Metric accuracy performance of solid state camera systems

Readily available solid-state cameras range from inexpensive camcorders to specialized systems with cooled 'high-resolution' sensors. Prices of such systems are between $500.- to $100,000.-. The choice of an appropriate imaging system, both in price and performance, is thus of interest to system developers and users. Although the radiometric and geometric characteristics of these systems vary drastically, the degree to which these differences affect the accuracy of three-dimensional measurements has not been investigated in detail. This paper compares the three-dimensional accuracy of some representative solid-state cameras (S-VHS camcorder, off-the-shelf CCD-cameras, 'high-resolution' camera) via a testfield with highly accurate reference coordinates. The performance of the different systems is analyzed with respect to potential limiting factors and improvements which could enhance the accuracy. Accuracies exceeding 1/20^th, 1/85^th, and 1/15^th of the pixel spacing were attained with a S-VHS camcorder, an off-the-shelf CCD-camera, and a 'high-resolution' camera with 3072 × 2320 pixels. The high level of performance is also evidenced by the relative accuracies in object space of 1:15000, 1:50000, and 1:35000 for the respective cameras.