Self-calibration for a non-central catadioptric camera with approximate epipolar geometry

Abstract

In spite of wide usage of catadioptric cameras, self-calibration for a non-central catadioptric camera remains very challenging work. In this paper, a novel self-calibration method for a non-central catadioptric camera is proposed. First, an approximate central projection is introduced. With a freely movable virtual viewpoint, the approximate central projection is able to compensate well the bias caused by the misalignment. Then a derived approximate epipolar geometry (AEG) for the non-central camera under the two-view case is given. Based on the AEG, a full self-calibration method using only two images is designed. Combined with an automatic initialization algorithm, the non-central catadioptric camera can be calibrated robustly without any manual intervention. Experiments on both synthetic data and real images verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.