Measurement of human stature from surveillance camera based on projective geometry

In this paper, we propose a novel measurement method of human stature by single view surveillance camera with minimum and sufficient effort of camera calibration. In this method, we calibrate the camera only towards the vertical direction to the ground by using multiple poles with known length which are placed at the arbitrary positions. Even though the horizontal positions of the poles are unknown, we can obtain the geometrical information which is sufficient to estimate the vertical length of the human according to the length of the poles. In the estimation of the human stature, we compute the homography between the plane along with the tips of the poles (pole-top plane) and the ground plane. Using this homography, we can determine any image point that has the same height from the ground, then we can determine the point of the pole length height in the human region. By comparing with the point and the head top point of the human, we can compute the stature with real scale. We have experimentally confirmed that proposed method can be more accurate and easier measurement than the measurement by the traditional camera calibration method using a chess board.