Assessment of multi-camera calibration algorithms for two-dimensional camera arrays relative to ground truth position and direction

Abstract

Camera calibration methods are commonly evaluated on cumulative reprojection error metrics, on disparate one-dimensional datasets. To evaluate calibration of cameras in two-dimensional ar-rays, assessments need to be made on two-dimensional datasets with constraints on camera parameters. In this study, accuracy of several multi-camera calibration methods has been evaluated on camera parameters that are affecting view projection the most. As input data, we used a 15-viewpoint two-dimensional dataset with intrinsic and extrinsic parameter constraints and extrinsic ground truth. The assessment showed that self-calibration methods using structure-from-motion reach equal intrinsic and extrinsic parameter estimation accuracy with standard checkerboard calibration algorithm, and surpass a well-known self-calibration toolbox, BlueCCal. These results show that self-calibration is a viable approach to calibrating two-dimensional camera arrays, but improvements to state-of-art multi-camera feature matching are necessary to make BlueCCal as accurate as other self-calibration methods for two-dimensional camera arrays.