Multidimensional photogrammetry of short-lived events

This thesis presents a collection of photogrammetry techniques aimed at the analysis of short-lived events. The small time scale on which these phenomena happen makes them difficult to capture not only from the point of view of hardware but also because one can not obtain several measurements of events that are not repeatable. Three subjects are presented in ascending order of complexity. We first detail a new approach that uses a simple unidimensional image sensor for traffic monitoring in order to obtain a large number of accurate measurements like speed, acceleration or inter-vehicle distances. This is followed by a discussion on the reconstruction of the surface of an evanescent liquid flow using stereovision on floating tracers. Finally, a new spectral model is used for the three-dimensional detection of aircraft wake vortices from IR LIDAR measurements. The approach was successfully tested during flight tests and proved to be invaluable to detect the wakes under these specific conditions.