Surveyor : MOBILE HIGHWAY INVENTORY AND MEASUREMENT SYSTEM

Surveyor is a mobile highway data collection system designed to collect measurement data about objects, features, structures, and landmarks located along highways and roadways, for highway planning, managing, and maintenance. It creates classified inventories annotated with object dimensions, object position relative to the road, and global position reference. The mobile data collection part of the system consists of a high speed multifunction vehicle with minimum compliment of a right of way video system with a precisely calibrated high resolution video camera, a distance measuring instrument for spatial positioning, a gyroscopic geometrics system and an ultrasonic grade system for precise measurement of vehicle attitude. Data acquisition is facilitated by multiple on board computers, and the right of way video uses time code to synchronize to the geometric and position databases. The interactive (post processing) part of the system uses a workstation to retrieve and buffer the video for the user to identify targets, using point and click with a mouse, to classify them, and to request position or size measurements. The software can make measurements on multiple images using triangulation, or on single images using the idealized plane of the highway as a reference.