Camera self-calibration from translation by referring to a known camera.

Abstract

This paper presents a novel linear method for camera self-calibration by referring to a known (or calibrated) camera. The method requires at least three images, with two images generated by the uncalibrated camera from pure translation and one image generated by the known reference camera. We first propose a method to compute the infinite homography from scene depths. Based on this, we use two images generated by translating the uncalibrated camera to recover scene depths, which are further utilized to linearly compute the infinite homography between an arbitrary uncalibrated image, and the image from the known camera. With the known camera as reference, the computed infinite homography is readily decomposed for camera calibration. The proposed self-calibration method has been tested with simulation and real image data. Experimental results demonstrate that the method is practical and accurate. This paper proposes using a "known reference camera" for camera calibration. The pure translation, as required in the method, is much more maneuverable, compared with some strict motions in the literature, such as pure rotation. The proposed self-calibration method has good potential for solving online camera calibration problems, which has important applications, especially for multicamera and zooming camera systems.