Camera calibration based on virtual planar targets

摘要

Camera calibration plays an important role in the field of machine vision and photogrammetry, and among the practical calibration methods, the one proposed by Zhang Zheng You is higher accuracy and easily operated. However, this method needs to move the camera (or the planar target) to get three or more target images at different locations, and it is better to uniformly fill the calibration target in whole measurement volume to improve the calibrate precision. But manual movement and placement of the targets frequently will increase the difficulty in guaranteeing the uniform distribution of target. In view of this situation and according to the linear imaging model of the camera, a new camera calibration method based on the virtual planar targets is proposed in this paper. A liquid crystal display was used as a target plane, and the 2D target graphics were displayed on this LCD screen. Using TSai's camera calibration method to get initial parameters, a serial of images of the virtual planar targets in different positions were captured with keeping the display position unchanged and are used to calculate the internal and external parameters of the camera by classic Zhang's camera calibration method, and the new internal and external parameters would again guide the movement of virtual target. After several iterations, camera parameters can be obtained with high precision. The presented method is flexible and easy to operate, and it has been applied to calibrate different cameras and an actual 3D shape measurement system in our Lab. The comparison results of the transverse coordinates in plane calculated by this method and by Zhang's camera calibration method shows that this proposed method is quite accurate and reliable.