Cue-based camera calibration and its application to digital moving image production

Abstract

Recently, some research institutes have started studying digital production of a panoramic image sequence from an observed moving image sequence, construction of a virtual studio with the 3-D CG technology and so on, with the intent to establish the concept and the schema of the new generation digital image production technology. One of the keys to new-generation digital image production is to construct simple methods for estimating the camera's motion, position, and orientation from a moving image sequence observed with a single TV camera. For that purpose, a method is presented for camera calibration and estimation of focal length. The method utilizes four definite coplanar points—for example, four vertices of an A4 size paper—as a cue. Moreover, the cue-based method is applied to the digital image production task of making up a moving image sequence of a synthetic 3-D CG image sequence and a real moving image sequence taken with a TV camera. The cue-based method works well for the task.