Camera Calibration and the Search for Infinity

This paper considers the problem of self-calibration of a camera from an image sequence in the case where the camera's internal parameters (most notably focal length) may change. The problem of camera self-calibration from a sequence of images has proven to be a difficult one in practice, due to the need ultimately to resort to non-linear methods, which have often proven to be unreliable. In a stratified approach to self-calibration, a projective reconstruction is obtained first and this is successively refined first to an affine and then to a Euclidean (or metric) reconstruction. It has been observed that the difficult step is to obtain the affine reconstruction, or equivalently to locate the plane at infinity in the projective coordinate frame. The problem is inherently non-linear and requires iterative methods that risk not finding the optimal solution. The present paper overcomes this difficulty by imposing cheirality constraints to limit the search for the plane at infinity ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: ICCV
• Authors: Richard I. Hartley, Lourdes de Agapito, Ian D. Reid, Eric Hayman
• Keywords: Camera Self-calibration, Camera's Internal Parameters, Computer Vision, Dense Search, ICCV 1999