A master-slave calibration algorithm with fish-eye correction

Abstract

Surveillance systems capable of autonomously monitoring vast areas are an emerging trend, particularly when wide-angle cameras are combined with pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras in a master-slave configuration. The use of fish-eye lenses allows the master camera to maximize the coverage area while the PTZ acts as a foveal sensor, providing high-resolution images of regions of interest. Despite the advantages of this architecture, the mapping between image coordinates and pan-tilt values is the major bottleneck in such systems, since it depends on depth information and fish-eye effect correction. In this paper, we address these problems by exploiting geometric cues to perform height estimation. This information is used both for inferring 3D information from a single static camera deployed on an arbitrary position and for determining lens parameters to remove fish-eye distortion. When compared with the previous approaches, our method has the following advantages: (1) fish-eye distortion is corrected without relying on calibration patterns; (2) 3D information is inferred from a single static camera disposed on an arbitrary location of the scene.