Carnegie Mellon Researchers Turn Smartphones Into Rulers

Smartphones can do just about anything you can think of these days thanks to the wealth of apps that are out there. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a way to use a smartphones sensor to create a 3D model of objects and faces that can be accurately measured. To calibrate the sensors for measurement all the user needs to do is wave the camera around.

To turn the smartphone into a fancy ruler the researchers took advantage of the inertial measurement unit (IMU) that is used by smartphone manufacturers to automatically change the orientation of the screen from portrait to landscape when the user moves the phone. Those sensors aren't particularly precise, but researcher Simon Lucey says that the IMU is good enough that it can be calibrated to get accurate measurement from models.

The team says that using a face tracker program and the IMU inside the smartphone it was able to measure the distance between a person's pupils to an accuracy of half a millimeter. The team says that this capability could be used for things like shopping for glasses.

With computer vision improvements, the techniques developed by the team could be used to model a room in 3D to see of furniture or other items would fit inside in the future. With this tech, Lucey says that the team can turn any smartphone into a ruler and as more devices use high frame rate cameras like the iPhone 6, the accuracy of this technique will get even better.

SOURCE: CMU