Patent ID: 8406510
Filing Date: 2013-03-26
Classification: G06K,G06T

Abstract:
1. A distance evaluation method for evaluating distances of at least one object within a range in a scene, comprising the steps of: capturing an image containing focused and defocused regions with an image acquisition system; segmenting the captured image in order to obtain at least one segment; computing a blur metric for the at least one image segment of the captured image; and relating the blur metric to the distance of the objects from the observation point in the at least on image segment, wherein the scene in the captured image contains distinct objects and the image segmentation is performed by the following steps: an optional background subtraction with computer vision techniques, a thresholding on a gray scale version of the image or on each or any channel of the image followed by a contour detection in order to obtain individual image segments in the grayscale image or in each color channel of the image.