Research on camera calibration using new optimization strategy

Abstract

An important task for stereo vision is camera calibration, whose goal is to obtain the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of each camera. This paper proposes a new accurate calibration method with multilevel process of camera parameters. In order to improve the calibration accuracy, a sub-pixel corner detection method is presented. We start with several views of a planar calibration to obtain some intrinsic camera parameters and to build an accurate model with lens distortion on a planar calibration target. Flexibly making use of geometry imaging theory, our algorithm obtains all the parameters through logical organization of solving order, accordingly avoids obtaining possible local optimized problem when solving the non-linear equation, gets over the relativity influence of every unknown parameters of traditional calibration way, and makes the error distributed among the constraint relation of parameters. Experiments with real images are carried out to verify the image correction effect and numerical robustness of our results. Compared with classical calibration techniques, that use expensive equipment and complicated mathematical computation, the proposed technique, which was verified by experiment, achieves high accuracy and reliable parameters. © 2011 Versita Warsaw and Springer-Verlag Wien.