Combining off- and on-line calibration of a digital camera

Abstract

We introduce a novel outlook on the self-calibration task, by considering images taken by a camera in motion, allowing for zooming and focusing. Apart from the complex relationship between the lens control settings and the intrinsic camera parameters, a prior off-line calibration allows to neglect the setting of focus, and to fix the principal point and aspect ratio throughout distinct views. Thus, the calibration matrix is dependent only on the zoom position. Given a fully calibrated reference view, one has only one parameter to estimate for any other view of the same scene, in order to calibrate it and to be able to perform metric reconstructions. We provide a close-form solution, and validate the reliability of the algorithm with experiments on real images. An important advantage of our method is a reduced -to one-number of critical camera configurations, associated with it. Moreover we propose a method for computing the epipolar geometry of two views, taken from different positions and with different (spatial) resolutions; the idea is to take an appropriate third view, that is "easy" to match with the other two.