CMSC733: Camera Calibration Techniques

Camera calibration is the process of estimating the parameters of the camera. There are two sets of parameters for a camera: intrinsic parameters, and extrinsic parameters. It is generally assumed that we know the coordinates of a set of points in the world reference frame and their corresponding points in one or more images. The notations used and the general problem of calibration is described in Section 2. Most of the times we use a calibration device for which the relative position of points on the device are known with respect to a point on the device. Two such devices are presented in Figure 1. Section 3.1 describes in detail one such method that performs camera calibration. It is also possible to perform Self Calibration, i.e., extract the intrinsic parameters using a moving camera and a set of point correspondences only [3] or from two views of a purely rotating camera. A brief description of these methods is provided in Section 4.