Calibration of omnidirectional cameras in practice: A comparison of methods

Luis Puig (1) , Jesús Bermúdez (2) , Peter Sturm (3) , Josechu Guerrero (1)

1 DIIS - Departamento de Informática e Ingeniería de Sistemas
2 ITA - Instituto Tecnologico de Aragon
3 STEEP - Sustainability transition, environment, economy and local policy

Omnidirectional cameras are becoming increasingly popular in computer vision and robotics. Camera calibration is a step before performing any task involving metric scene measurement, required in nearly all robotics tasks. In recent years many different methods to calibrate central omnidirectional cameras have been developed, based on different camera models and often limited to a specific mirror shape. In this paper we review the existing methods designed to calibrate any central omnivision system and analyze their advantages and drawbacks doing a deep comparison using simulated and real data. We choose methods available as OpenSource and which do not require a complex pattern or scene. The evaluation protocol of calibration accuracy also considers 3D metric reconstruction combining omnidirectional images. Comparative results are shown and discussed in detail.

Mots clés: Omnidirectional camera; Catadioptric systems; Calibration; Scene reconstruction

Domaines: Vision par ordinateur et reconnaissance de formes [cs.CV]

Luis Puig, Jesús Bermúdez, Peter Sturm, Josechu Guerrero. Calibration of omnidirectional cameras in practice: A comparison of methods. Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 2012, Special Issue: Virtual Representations and Modeling of Large-scale Environments (VRML), 116 (1), pp.120-137. ⟨10.1016/j.cviu.2011.08.003⟩. ⟨hal-00644989⟩