A multimedia stereo calibration algorithm based on rectangular pyramidal method used to aid visual navigation of ALVs under low illumination

Abstract

In order to measure and reconstruct accurate three-dimension (3D) data for visual aided navigation of autonomous land vehicles (ALVs), a multimedia stereo calibration algorithm which is suitable for normal scene and especially for low illumination scene is proposed. Firstly, an expression of object-point re-projection errors is derived by the collinear equation model, and the non-linear least square algorithm (NLS) is introduced to iteratively optimize external parameters for individual camera. A rectangular pyramidal method enforcing the rectangular geometric constraint is presented, to produce more stable initial parameter values. Then, according to imaging-point correspondences between the left and right camera, a re-projection error model is constructed for this stereo calibration system, of which all parameters are further optimized and calculated through the calibrated results of two separate cameras. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve re-projection errors of no more than 0.5 pixels and converge fast usually with less than 10 interation times, whether under normal illumination or low illumination, so it can get better performance and realize a rapid re-calibration.