Design and recognition of three dimensional calibration target based on coded marker

Abstract

Traditional three-dimensional (3D) calibration targets consist of two or three mutual orthogonal planes (each of the planes contains several control points constituted by corners or circular points) that cannot be captured simultaneously by cameras in front view. Therefore, large perspective distortions exist in the images of the calibration targets resulting in inaccurate image coordinate detection of the control points. Besides, in order to eliminate mismatches, recognition of the control points usually needs manual intervention consuming large amount of time. A new design of 3D calibration target is presented for automatic and accurate camera calibration. The target employs two parallel planes instead of orthogonal planes to reduce perspective distortion, which can be captured simultaneously by cameras in front view. Control points of the target are constituted by carefully designed circular coded markers, which can be used to realize automatic recognition without manual intervention. Due to perspective projection, projections of the circular coded markers’ centers deviate from the centers of their corresponding imaging ellipses. Colinearity of the control points is used to correct perspective distortions of the imaging ellipses. Experiment results show that the calibration target can be automatically and correctly recognized under large illumination and viewpoint change. The image extraction errors of the control points are under 0.1 pixels. When applied to binocular cameras calibration, the mean reprojection errors are less than 0.15 pixels and the 3D measurement errors are less than 0.2mm in x and y axis and 0.5mm in z axis respectively.