So, made a rough outline of the front of the vehicle in Gimp. I did this by hand but it looks like ImageJ and MIPAR can make this a lot easier.
By the way, I switched to ImageJ for analyzing the image. MIPAR was a level of complexity and capability above the scope of this project (let's say).
Anyways, here's a screenshot of the image before it was analyzed:
As you can see, the 48" level (it's 48', not 46") was left in to act as a scale. It was sitting level with the front of the Crosstour when the photo was taken.
You can also probably see how I cut out, mirrored, and pasted the driver's side mirror over to the pass. side. Impressive, I know.
Long story short, ImageJ has a tool that let's you draw a line across some feature in the image and say "this is 48 inches long". It then applies a pixel/inch scale to the entire image. You can use a few different, more sophisticated tools to outline what you want to take the area of, but I just used their magic wand tool, since my image was a pretty rough outline anyways.
Here's the analyzed image in ImageJ,with the Crosstour magic wanded in yellow:
Because of the earlier scaling, I
think the units for that area are in square inches.
So, 2647.045 square inches becomes 18.382 square feet or 1.71 m^2.
For reference, just going by height and width, the Crosstour is 34.375 square feet or 3.19 m^2. That's, like, 53% so I'm guessing ImageJ didn't do a good job of measuring OR it used different units than square inches.
OR it could be everything that's missing underneath the car in the image. Not sure.
At any rate, I took measurements for distance from the car and camera height, so I can recreate this experiment relatively easy. If I can't figure out the exact area, I can at least get a good idea of how much area was decreased.