Three-Dimensional Description of Sewer Laterals via Reflective Photometric Stereo

Previous efforts have been directed towards provision of a visual sensing facility capable of the detection of lateral pipe entries in non-man-entry(NME) sewers. Attention is now turned to lateral description. A novel variant of the established vision technique photometric stereo is presented. The current goal of the new technique, reflective photometric stereo, is the 3D description of lateral connections from images captured during the survey pass of an insituform process. This requires the integration of a single fixed camera and controllable light source.