How to calculate camera position from retroreflectors

[Aur0r4]

Originally Posted by KyloRen42

But that only gives me distance, how do i determine where I lie on that circle?

We took a stab at this exact same situation a few different years, and its actually significantly harder than it sounds. Aside from the actual mathematics of it, the cameras we have access to do not produced a "flat" image. It has spherical distortion that isn't really obvious until you try doing math on different parts of the image. Even high end cameras used for actual aerial survey have this problem....we see it in "orthophotos" that have been corrected to give a reasonably "flat" picture that you can make measurements on. The jagged corrections made to straight line objects like roads gets more and more obvious the farther you get from the center of the frame. Also, parallax and other problems.

We can certainly learn things from the camera image, don't get me wrong.

Definitely rooting you on for trying to figure this out, and I'm definitely not saying its not objectively possible. Its just really, really hard with the equipment and processing power we have.