An Effective Technique for Calibrating a Binocular Stereo Through Projective Reconstruction Using Both a Calibration Object and the Environment

Zhengyou Zhang, Olivier Faugeras, and Rachid Deriche
INRIA Sophia-Antipolis



Abstract

We present a novel technique for effectively calibrating a binocular stereo rig using the information from both scenes and classical calibration objects. The calibration provided by the classical methods is only valid for the space near the position of the calibration object. Our technique tries to make the best use of the rigidity of the geometry between two cameras. The idea is to first estimate precisely the epipolar geometry which is valid for a wide range in space from all available matches, extracted from both the environment and the calibration objects. This allows us to conduct an accurate projective reconstruction. Using the \emph{a priori} knowledge of the calibration object, we are finally able to calibrate the stereo rig in a Euclidean space. The proposed technique has been tested with a number of real images, and significant improvement has been observed. A mirror of the WWW demo available at the Contents page is also available at http://www.inria.fr/robotvis/personnel/zzhang/CalibEnv/CalibEnv.html

Keywords: camera calibration, stereo vision, on-line calibration