Non-Metric Calibration of Wide-Angle Lenses and Polycameras

Images taken with wide-angle cameras tend to have severe distortions which pull points towards the optical center: This paper proposes a method for recovering the disrortion parameters without the use of any calibration objects. The distortions cause straight lines in the scene to appear as curves in the image. Our algorithm seeks tojind the distortion parameters that would map the image curves to straight lines. The user selects a small set of points along the image curves. Recovery of the parameters is formulated as the minimization of an objective function which is designed to explicitly accountfor noise in the selected image points. Experimental results are presented for synthetic data with difSerent noise levels as well asfor real images. Once calibrated, the image streamsfrom these cameras can be undistorted in real time using look up tables. We also present an application of this calibration method for wide-angle camera clusters, which we call polycameras. We apply our distorti...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: CVPR
• Authors: Rahul Swaminathan, Shree K. Nayar
• Keywords: Computer Vision, CVPR 1999, Distortion Correction Technique, Distortion Parameters, Image Points, Wide-angle Camera Clusters, Wide-angle Cameras