Optical Principles of Beam Splitters

In conventional photogrammetry, three-dimensional coordinates are obtained from two consecutive images of a stationary object photographed from two exposure stations, separated by a certain distance. However, it is impossible to photograph moving objects from two stations with one camera at the same time. Various methods to overcome this obstacle were devised e. g. taking the left and right scenes simultaneously with one camera using a beam splitter attached to the front, thus creating a stereo scene in one image. A beam splitter consists of two outer mirrors and two inner mirrors. This paper deals with research where the optical principles of the beam splitter were evaluated based on light path phenomena between the outer mirrors and the inner mirrors. A mathematical model of the geometric configuration was derived for the beam splitter. This allows us to design and control a beam splitter to obtain maximum scale and maximum base-height ratio by stepwise application of the mathematical model. The results show that the beam splitter is a very useful tool for stereophotography with one camera. The optimum geometric configurations ensuring maximum scale and base-height ratio are closely related to inner and outer reflector sizes, their inclination angles and the offsets between the outer mirrors.