An image based approach to compute object distance

Computing object distance using image processing is an important research area in the field of computer vision and robot navigation applications. In this paper we have proposed a new method to compute the distance of an object using a single image. According to our observation there exists a relationship between the physical distance of an object and its pixel height. We exploit this relationship to train a system that finds a mapping between an object’s pixel height and physical distance. This mapping is then used to find the physical distance of test objects from the pixel height in the image. Experimental results demonstrate the capability of our proposed technique by estimating physical distance with accuracy as high as 98.76%.