Multi-Camera Extrinsic Calibration for Real-Time Tracking in Large Outdoor Environments

Abstract

Calibrating intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters is a fundamental problem that is a preliminary task for a wide variety of applications, from robotics to computer vision to surveillance and industrial tasks. With the advent of Internet of Things (IoT) technology and edge computing capabilities, the ability to track motion activities in large outdoor areas has become feasible. The proposed work presents a network of IoT camera nodes and a dissertation on two possible approaches for automatically estimating their poses. One approach follows the Structure from Motion (SfM) pipeline, while the other is marker-based. Both methods exploit the correspondence of features detected by cameras on synchronized frames. A preliminary indoor experiment was conducted to assess the performance of the two methods compared to ground truth measurements, employing a commercial tracking system of millimetric precision. Outdoor experiments directly compared the two approaches on a larger setup. The results show that the proposed SfM pipeline more accurately estimates the pose of the cameras. In addition, in the indoor setup, the same methods were used for a tracking application to show a practical use case.