Radial lens distortion correction using cascaded one-parameter division model

Abstract

Radial lens distortion is the most significant lens distortion in current cameras, and many models are proposed to describe it. Fitzgibbon presented the prestigious division distortion model with just a single parameter. Based on the fact that a line in 3D space may be projected onto a curve in the image plane due to radial distortion, Aleman et al. utilized the Hough transform with three parameters to automatically correct radial lens distortion, namely, one parameter coming from the division model, and the other two arising from the corrected image line. However, in some cases, especially for wide angle lenses, the corrected results are not very satisfactory. Someone may suggest that we can use the so-called extended division model with more than one parameter. Unfortunately, the problem will become very hard to solve, since the dimensions of the Hough parameter space become higher than three. In this paper, we propose a cascaded one-parameter division model to deal with the problem. In each stage the Hough parameter space is always three-dimensional. Enormous experiments on real images illustrate the ability of our method.