Camera calibration for miniature, low-cost, wide-angle imaging systems

Abstract

This paper presents a new model and an extension to an existing algorithm for camera calibration. The main goal of the proposed approach is to calibrate miniature, low-cost, wide-angle fisheye lenses. The model has been verified with a calibration implementation and was tested on real data. Experiments show that the proposed model improves the accuracy compared to the original algorithm. Results show that the extension not only performs well with fisheye lenses but also with omnidirectional catadioptric lenses as well as other less distorted dioptric lenses. 1 Motivation and Related Work Wide-angle, hemispherical or omnidirectional camera systems have become more popular in the last few years. Especially in robotic applications, wide-angle sensors are favourable for perception and navigation problems. A precise calibration is needed in order to infer accurate bearing information for the 2D pixel information. Three different types of calibration methods can be distinguished. The most common