How to measure room dimention using RpLIDAR(2d Lidar) or image processing

Question

In a project, we are creating a virtual tour of an apartment. We want to display the room dimension in that virtual image. So far we are using RICO theta v to create the virtual tour. One example is given below. The first image shows a panoramic view of the room. Now using Lidar we want to measure the room length and width. My question is: is there any way where i could attach this Lidar information to the image that I got from the RICO. so that the user can measure the distance from the picture or we can display the length and width of the room.

so, in short, I want to know: 1. What could be the possible solution to modify the image based on Lidar output? 2. Is there any way where I could find room dimensions using Lidar output?

I will be so glad if you give me some ideas.

Answer 1

The LIDAR sensor outputs a pointcloud, which is a 3D representation of your room. Every point in the 3D pointcloud represents a small point in the room, and the distances between points are distances between real objects.

Therefore, you would only need to know which points correspond to the corners of the room, and then you could measure the distance between them and compute the area. There can be some options of automatically detecting corners in the pointcloud, some of which are suggested here: How to find corner points of any object in point cloud and find distance between corner points in inch/cm/m?

The problem is that this is not as easy to correlate with an image. One approach, assuming a static setup, would be to manually align the pointcloud with the image. Also, as there are approaches for automatic corner detection in the pointcloud, there are some options for automatic corner detection in images, such as the Harris corner detector.

Of course, all these methods will be prone to detecting all corners in the image, so some heuristics for filtering them might be needed.