I work in a team of people that deal with road traffic collisions and as part of our work, I use a Riegl VZ400 3D Scanner which has a Nikon D300 permanently attached.
The process is that the scanner performs a 360 degree lidar scan of an area and then it triggers the camera for 5 separate images through a fisheye lens capturing a full 360 degree panorama that is then mapped onto the lidar information to provide a 'real-world' view when the scans are registered and mapped together.
My problem is that the camera comes with pre-determined settings which cater for the more common circumstances - i.e. outdoor with relatively good lighting, but as the camera is controlled by the scanner, we cannot change any settings once the 5 image captures are triggered. The most common problem here is one of lighting - invariably, one of the images is directly into the sun and it regularly occurs that the sun disappears behind cloud or appears from behind them, so the lighting conditions can vary greatly.
The impact of this is that when the five images are mapped onto the lidar data, I end up with a panoramic view around the scanner position that looks like a patchwork.
After all that rambling, as I cannot do anything with the camera settings, I was wondering if there was anything I can do within PS CS5 that would enable me to normalise the lighting settings across the five images.
The added difficulty then, of course is that the project can encompass a minimum of 4 scan positions, each with 5 images and trying to normalise all of them is a daunting prospect, but if there is a way to do, I'm guessing PS should be able to do it.
The process is that the scanner performs a 360 degree lidar scan of an area and then it triggers the camera for 5 separate images through a fisheye lens capturing a full 360 degree panorama that is then mapped onto the lidar information to provide a 'real-world' view when the scans are registered and mapped together.
My problem is that the camera comes with pre-determined settings which cater for the more common circumstances - i.e. outdoor with relatively good lighting, but as the camera is controlled by the scanner, we cannot change any settings once the 5 image captures are triggered. The most common problem here is one of lighting - invariably, one of the images is directly into the sun and it regularly occurs that the sun disappears behind cloud or appears from behind them, so the lighting conditions can vary greatly.
The impact of this is that when the five images are mapped onto the lidar data, I end up with a panoramic view around the scanner position that looks like a patchwork.
After all that rambling, as I cannot do anything with the camera settings, I was wondering if there was anything I can do within PS CS5 that would enable me to normalise the lighting settings across the five images.
The added difficulty then, of course is that the project can encompass a minimum of 4 scan positions, each with 5 images and trying to normalise all of them is a daunting prospect, but if there is a way to do, I'm guessing PS should be able to do it.
