Easy-to-use calibration of multiple-camera setups

Abstract

Calibration of the pinhole camera model has a well-established theory, especially in the presence of a known calibration object. Unfortunately, in wide-base multi-camera setups, it is hard to create a calibration object, which is visible by all the cameras simultaneously. This results in the fact that conventional calibration methods do not scale well. Using well-known algorithms, we developed a streamlined calibration method, which is able to calibrate multi-camera setups only with the help of a planar calibration object. The object does not have to be observed by at the same time by all the cameras involved in the calibration. Our algorithm breaks down the calibration into four consecutive steps: feature extraction, distortion correction, intrinsic and finally extrinsic calibration. We also made the implementation of the presented method available from our website.