A new method for linear camera calibration and nonlinear distortion correction

Abstract

Recent progress of images taken by non-metric digital cameras encourages amateurs to utilize it for 3D measurements, but also introduces the difficulties of calibration. The ideal camera projection model is based on the pinhole linear model which proceeds on the assumption that the object point, the perspective center of the lens and the ideal image point all lie on a straight line. However, real camera lenses introduce nonlinear distortions that affect the accuracy of the transformation unless proper corrections are applied. In this paper, we present a new camera calibration method adopting a linear projection model and a nonlinear lens distortion model. Experiments are conducted on real data to compare the proposed method with the non-linear bundle adjustment and DLT (Direct Linear Translation), which shows that the accuracy obtained with the proposed method is close to the former, and much higher than the latter.