Robust Active Stereo Calibration

We present a calibration procedure to determine the kinematic parameters of an active stereo system in a robot-centric frame of reference. Our goal was to obtain a solution of sufficient accuracy that the kinematic model information can be used to estimate scene structure given the measured motion/position of the eye and target object’s image location. We formulate our problem using canonical coordinates of the rotation group. which enables a particularly simple closed form solution. Additionally, this formulation and solution provides quantitative measures of the resulting solutions. Experiments verify that the solutions are accurate, 3D structure can be estimated from the kinematic models, and the algorithm can indicate when image errors are large enough to produce un-reliable results.