Hi.

OK, here's one for the more mathematically oriented programmers.

Given a pair of stereo photographs of the same scene, how would you process them to extract depth information?

I know it's possible, but the mathematics is beyond me. I don't know if there is any software available to do this, or at least any open-source software. I've looked, but all I can find are a few packages to deal with satellite images, which isn't quite what I want.

I'd like to be able to take stereo pairs of the ground from one of my model planes, and generate reasonably good digital elevation data from the images. This is a technique that's used commercially, but the resulting data is extremely expensive.

I don't want to map the entire country, just specific ares where I fly. Is this something that's possible with a sensible amount of effort, or am I going to have to design that subminiature lidar scanner after all?

pca