Color calibration for multi-camera imaging systems

Abstract

In multi-view imaging, a number of cameras capture the same scene from different viewpoints for regeneration of the light rays which may be emitted by a special display for 3D visualization. However, there are many conditions such as spectral characteristics of the optics, lighting variations, and sensor characteristics that cause color variations among captured multi-view images; therefore, these variations cause difficulties in accurately reproducing color consistency in multi-view 3D imaging systems. As a result, color variations between the camera views may deteriorate viewer's 3D visualization experiences. The process employed to compensate for the color variations of inter-camera images is called multi-camera color calibration. In this paper, a color calibration method with respect to a reference camera for multi-camera systems is devised by utilizing a set of robustly detected stereo correspondences between camera pairs. The method results a 3×4 coefficient matrix multiplier that can be used for color correction operations rapidly. Objective evaluation of the experimental results shows that the proposed method can minimize the color differences between the captured multi-view images to an acceptable level relative to subjective evaluation results.