Geometric Stability of Low-cost Digital Consumer Cameras

During the last years the number of available low-cost digital consumer cameras has significantly increased while their prices decrease. Therefore for many applications with no high-end accuracy requirements it is an important consideration whether to use low-cost cameras. This paper investigates in the use of consumer cameras for photogrammetric measurements and vision systems. An important aspect of the suitability of these cameras is their geometric stability. Two aspects should be considered: The change of calibration parameters when using the camera’s features such as zoom or auto focus and the time invariance of the calibration parameters. Therefore laboratory calibrations of different cameras have been carried out at different times. The resulting calibration parameters, especially the principal distance and the principal point, and their accuracies are given. The usefulness of the information given in the image header, especially the focal length, is compared to the results of the calibration.