A 3D calibration method for binocular vision system

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Abstract Binocular vision system calibration is extremely important in three-dimensional (3D) measurement. During the calibration process, the establishment of an appropriate objective function has a direct impact on the calibration accuracy. For common two-dimensional (2D) calibration methods, differences in 2D calibration and 3D measurement coordinate systems result in loss of accuracy. Furthermore, for the newly proposed 3D calibration methods, the epipolar constraints in the 2D pixel coordinate system and the reconstruction errors in the 3D physical space need to be balanced by weights, resulting in uncertainties in the calibration results. To address these issues, we propose a novel calibration method that minimizes the distances between the control point and the left and right camera rays. The distances between the control points and the camera rays describe the 3D reconstruction errors, and the distances between the left camera and the right camera rays describe the geometry information between the two cameras to ensure that the epipolar constraints are satisfied. As a result, these two types of constraints/errors are measured under the same 3D coordinate system. Therefore, the epipolar constraints and the reconstruction errors are naturally balanced. We have conducted computer simulations and real experiments, and the results show that the proposed calibration method is effective in improving the accuracy compared with the state-of-the-art methods.