Patent ID: 7277599

Claim:
A method of using a single camera to determine three dimensional (3D) position information for a designated point on an object, the method comprising: determining a linkage distance between the designated point and a seeding point on the object; defining a 3D viewfield coordinate system having orthogonal axes in the viewfield of the camera and designating the coordinate axis most nearly parallel to the optical axis of the camera as the depth axis; mapping locations in the image plane to unique lines of sight in the viewfield of the camera, wherein a coordinate along the depth axis determines a unique position along a particular line of sight mapped from a particular location in the image plane; determining the position of the seeding point in the viewfield coordinate system; determining the location of the image of the designated point in the image plane; and computing the position of the designated point along the depth axis as a function of the position of the seeding point along the depth axis, the linkage distance between the designated point and the seeding point, and the location of the image of the designated point in the image plane.