Accurate camera calibration using iterative refinement of control points

Abstract

We describe a novel camera calibration algorithm for square, circle, and ring planar calibration patterns. An iterative refinement approach is proposed that utilizes the parameters obtained from traditional calibration algorithms as initialization to perform undistortion and unprojection of calibration images to a canonical fronto-parallel plane. This canonical plane is then used to localize the calibration pattern control points and recompute the camera parameters in an iterative refinement until convergence. Undistorting and unprojecting the calibration pattern to the canonical plane increases the accuracy of control point localization and consequently of camera calibration. We have conducted an extensive set of experiments with real and synthetic images for the square, circle and ring pattern, and the pixel reprojection errors obtained by our method are about 50% lower than those of the OpenCV Camera Calibration Toolbox. Increased accuracy of camera calibration directly leads to improvements in other applications; we demonstrate recovery of fine object structure for visual hull reconstruction, and recovery of precise epipolar geometry for stereo camera calibration.