Camera calibration and 3D reconstruction from a single view based on scene constraints

This paper mainly focuses on the problem of camera calibration and 3D reconstruction from a single view of structured scene. It is well known that three constraints on the intrinsic parameters of a camera can be obtained from the vanishing points of three mutually orthogonal directions. However, there usually exist one or several pairs of line segments, which are mutually orthogonal and lie in the pencil of planes defined by two of the vanishing directions in the structured scenes. It is proved in this paper that a new independent constraint to the image of the absolute conic can be obtained if the pair of line segments is of equal length or with known length ratio in space. The constraint is further studied both in terms of the vanishing points and the images of circular points. Hence, four independent constraints on a camera are obtained from one image, and the camera can be calibrated under the widely accepted assumption of zero-skew. This paper also presents a simple method for the recovery of camera extrinsic parameters and projection matrix with respect to a given world coordinate system. Furthermore, several methods are presented to estimate the positions and poses of space planar surfaces from the recovered projection matrix and scene constraints. Thus, a scene structure can be reconstructed by combining the planar patches. Extensive experiments on simulated data and real images, as well as a comparative test with other methods in the literature, validate our proposed methods. q 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.