P2-4-1 
AUTO-TRACKING AND 3D MEASUREMENT FOR MOVING OBJECT USING VIDEO THEODOLITE 
Tsutomu KAKIUCH3, Hirofumi CHIKATSU 
Department of Civil Engineering 
Tokyo Denki University 
JAPAN 
kaki@g.dendai.ac.jp 
Commission V, Working Group IC V/in 
KEY WORDS: Video Theodolite, Auto-tracking, Real-time Positioning, Image Sequence, Moving Object, Stereo Adapter. 
ABSTRACT 
The authors have been concentrating on developing a video theodolite system consisting of a CCD camera, theodolite and a video 
recorder where the camera rotation parameters can be determined in real-time while recording a moving object. The most remarkable 
points of the video theodolite system are it's ability to obtain the camera rotation parameters and to calculate two-dimensional object 
position in real-time while tracking a moving object. 
In order to investigate an innovative application fields of the video theodolite system, a test was performed in the laboratory by fitting a 
stereo adapter which can acquire stereo image to a lens of a CCD camera of the video theodolite. Fitting a stereo adapter, three- 
dimensional object position can be obtained in real-time. 
This paper describes auto-tracking and three-dimensional measurement techniques for a moving object using the motorized video 
theodolite system. 
1 INTRODUCTION 
Auto-tracking and real-time positioning for a moving object is 
particularly expected in a monitoring system or navigation system 
for robot, construction machine and ship. Bayer, et al. (1984) 
developed realtime positioning system using an electronic camera 
mounted on a motorized theodolite. However, a CCD camera or 
CMOS camera recorded in real-time has been expected to 
become a useful tool in various digital photogrammetric fields. 
The concept of a video theodolite using a CCD camera was first 
published in Huang and Harley (1989) for automated camera 
calibration. Test measurement was performed by Heck (1993) 
using the video theodolite LEICA TM3000V to get a position of a 
moving object. 
The authors have been concentrating on developing a video 
theodolite system consisting of a CCD camera, a theodolite and a 
video recorder where the camera rotation parameters can be 
determined in real-time while recording a moving object. The 
current values of the rotation parameters are continuously 
superimposed on image frames and thus recorded as a part of the 
image data (Chikatsu and et al., 1994). The effectiveness of the 
video theodolite system for dynamic analysis of human motion 
has been demonstrated (Chikatsu and Murai, 1995, Chikatsu and 
et al., 1996) and the application of the video theodolite system to 
the ski jump also has been demonstrated (Chikatsu and et al., 
1997). 
However, there are some issues for an innovative application of 
the video theodolite system. These problems include rapid 
acceleration of tracking speed for a moving object and three- 
dimensional measurement. The first issue probably depends on 
the ability of hardware, and an intelligent camera is expected 
from the point of view of the real-time aspects. On the contrary, if 
a stereo image can be obtained using the video theodolite system, 
real-time three-dimensional measurement for a moving object 
can be achieved because the rotation parameters and stereo 
sequential images can be acquired in real-time while tracking a 
moving object. 
With this objective, a test was performed in the laboratory by 
fitting a stereo adapter to a lens of a CCD camera of the video 
theodolite. 
2 VIDEO THEODOLITE 
Figure 1 shows the motorized video theodolite (SOKKIA, 
MET2NV) used in this investigation. CCD 1, the upper one in 
the figure 1, is used for precise pointing to the target through the 
monitor, and CCD 2, the lower one, is used as a finder. In order 
to take wide scene, CCD 2 camera was mainly used in this paper. 
( -x 
Figure 1 Video Theodolite