Patent ID: 8269833

Claim:
A method for measuring movement of a video camera placed on a moving vehicle, the method comprising: (a) acquiring, by the video camera, a video data of the earth surface; (b) transforming the video data into a sequence of digital frames; (c) correcting perspective distortions of each digital frame; (d) finding a correlation of adjacent frames, wherein frame images have maximum coincidence; and (e) measuring off-set value between the adjacent frames, wherein: time intervals between the adjacent frames are measured; camera angle, camera field of view and camera height above the earth surface are recorded at a time of generation of each frame; a simplified image frame is created for each image frame by approximation and filtering of the image frame; perspective distortions are corrected for each simplified image frame based on the camera angle, the camera field of view and the camera height above the surface; correlation of adjacent simplified frames, wherein frame images having maximum coincidence are found; correction off-set value is calculated based on changes in the camera angle during generation of the image frames corresponding to the simplified image frames; and an actual off-set of portion of the surface is calculated based on the off-set of the adjacent simplified image frames corrected by the correction off-set value.