Hello folks.
First time posting to this forum, hope this is the correct section.
I’m looking into getting an OAK camera unit for a very specific purpose, and I wonder if any of you may be able to tell me if I’m barking up the wrong tree, or if it could be used for what I had in mind.
So, here goes. I work for a public utilities company with a terrible track record of inventorying its network. To help improve things, I came up with the suggestion of basically sticking a 3D sensing camera on a stick, shoving it into the open manholes (sewage or water, it will have a bad time down there) and just scanning the whole place. Initially, I was thinking about a LIDAR unit, but after seeing the price, that was quickly shot down. The budget for this is about what we can spare if we use less ink for the printers.
The idea would be sticking an OAK camera on a stick, linking it to a portable battery pack and having it capture depth aware image data that can then be used to take measurements of pipes and other elements that are basically impossible to see with the naked eye, and maybe using that data to build a 3D model of the chamber in Blender or QGIS or something or other. Can it capture point cloud data? Honestly, no clue. I’ve seen it being able to separate surfaces based on orientation, so I guess it could do that, hopefully, even if it’s just from a single angle, not a 360 view.
Now, I’m not entirely sure how an OAK unit would function on a stick. I mean, can it be triggered remotely and can it store things on an SD card? Or will I need to tie it to a Raspberry Pi, and than tie that to the stick as well, possibly with a touch-screen for control.
Though, adding that would be a bit more cumbersome for the field operator, who has already told me that he’d need another hand growing out of his back to handle the equipment he has now. So, the simpler I can make this, the better.
The alternative was to get a cheap phone on a camera, and then scrounge for a CUDA capable video card(which is impossibly expensive at this moment in time ) and see if I can get something done through photogrammetry.
So. Would an OAK camera unit be usable in a camera-on-a-stick 3D reconstruction tool?
Thanks for any advice you can give.