Investigation into the behaviour and modelling of chromatic aberrations in non-metric digital cameras

Abstract

Chromatic aberration in colour digital camera imagery can affect the accuracy of photogrammetric reconstruction. Both longitudinal and transverse chromatic aberrations can be effectively modelled by making separate measurements in each of the blue, green and red colour bands and performing a specialized self-calibrating bundle adjustment. This paper presents the results of an investigation with two aims. The first aim is to quantify the presence of chromatic aberration in two sets of cameras: the six individual cameras comprising a Ladybug5 system, calibrated simultaneously in air; and four GoPro Hero 5 cameras calibrated independently under water. The second aim is to investigate the impacts of imposing different constraints in the self-calibration adjustment. To this end, four different adjustment cases were performed for all ten cameras: independent adjustment of the observations from each colour band; combined adjustment of all colour bands' observations with common object points; combined adjustment of all colour bands with common object points and common exterior orientation parameters for each colour band triplet; and combined adjustment with common object points and certain common interior orientation parameters. The results show that the Ladybug5 cameras exhibit a small (1-2 pixel) amount of transverse chromatic aberration but no longitudinal chromatic aberration. The GoPro Hero 5 cameras exhibit significant (25 pixel) transverse chromatic aberration as well as longitudinal chromatic aberration. The principal distance was essentially independent of the adjustment case for the Ladybug5, but it was not for the GoPro Hero 5. The principal point position and precision were both affected considerably by adjustment case. Radial lens distortion was invariant to the adjustment case. The impact of adjustment case on decentring distortion was minimal in both cases.