High quality color calibration for multi-camera systems with an omnidirectional color checker

Abstract

This paper proposes a new color calibration method for multi-camera systems with a novel omnidirectional color checker. The designed cylindrical color checker contains a periodic array of color patches, and is visible for all the cameras without manual adjustment. For color calibration, accurate global correspondences are first generated by local descriptors and area-based correlation methods. Then, the multi-camera color calibration problem is formulated as an overdetermined linear system, in which the dynamic range shaping is incorporated to ensure the high contrasts of captured images. The cameras are calibrated with the parameters obtained by solving the linear system. According to experimental results on a real multi-camera system, the proposed method shows high performance in achieving inter-camera color consistency and high dynamic range.