A Flexible Technique for Accurate Omnidirectional Camera Calibration and Structure from Motion

  • Authors:

  • Davide Scaramuzza;Agostino Martinelli;Roland Siegwart

  • Affiliations:

  • Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland;Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland;Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • ICVS '06 Proceedings of the Fourth IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision Systems
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

In this paper, we present a flexible new technique for single viewpoint omnidirectional camera calibration. The proposed method only requires the camera to observe a planar pattern shown at a few different orientations. Either the camera or the planar pattern can be freely moved. No a priori knowledge of the motion is required, nor a specific model of the omnidirectional sensor. The only assumption is that the image projection function can be described by a Taylor series expansion whose coefficients are estimated by solving a two-step least-squares linear minimization problem. To test the proposed technique, we calibrated a panoramic camera having a field of view greater than 200 in the vertical direction, and we obtained very good results. To investigate the accuracy of the calibration, we also used the estimated omni-camera model in a structure from motion experiment. We obtained a 3D metric reconstruction of a scene from two highly distorted omnidirectional images by using image correspondences only. Compared with classical techniques, which rely on a specific parametric model of the omnidirectional camera, the proposed procedure is independent of the sensor, easy to use, and flexible.