Pipeline Reconstruction from Fisheye Images

Automatic inspection of pipelines has great potential to increase the efficiency and objectivity of pipeline inspection. 3-D pipeline reconstruction can provide a valuable addition to automatic pipeline inspection. We present a system which can reconstruct the inner surface of buried pipelines from multiple fisheye images captured inside the pipes. The reconstruction output will facilitate pipe condition analysis. Whereas the pipelines are huge, a fatal defect is usually as tiny as a fine crack. Therefore efficiency and accuracy both become the key requisites of our system. The repetitive patterns on the pipe surface and the poor illumination condition during photographing further increase the difficulty. We combine several successful methods in the literature as well as new methods proposed by ourselves and finally build up a system, which can reconstruct pipe surface not only accurately but also quickly. The system has been tested on real pipe images and shows promising performance.