Complete generic camera calibration and modeling using spline surfaces

Abstract

The generic camera model considered in this work can be regarded as a mapping between image pixels and viewing rays. These rays are independent of each other which prohibits a standard parametric approach for calibration and modeling of these cameras. Spline surfaces are used here to calibrate and model generic imaging devices. This allows the utilization of sparse planar calibration boards and facilitates general forward projection as well as subpixel back projection. In contrast to other works the complete image area is to be calibrated, not only a part of it. This is done by adding further views of calibration patterns after an initial calibration step, which expands the calibrated region of the camera image. Results with two different imaging devices prove the general applicability of the proposed method and the comparison to an established parametric calibration procedure shows its superiority. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.