Wide-angle lens distortion correction using division models

Abstract

In this paper we propose a new method to automatically correct wide-angle lens distortion from the distorted lines generated by the projection on the image of 3D straight lines. We have to deal with two major problems: on the one hand, wide-angle lenses produce a strong distortion, which makes the detection of distorted lines a particularly difficult task. On the other hand, the usual single parameter polynomial lens distortion models is not able to manage such a strong distortion. We propose an extension of the Hough transform by adding a distortion parameter to detect the distorted lines, and division lens distortion models to manage wide-angle lens distortion. We present some experiments on synthetic and real images to show the ability of the proposed approach to automatically correct this type of distortion. A comparison with a state-of-the-art method is also included to show the benefits of our method. © Springer-Verlag 2013.