Modeling dynamic target deformation in camera calibration

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to explicitly model and optimize dynamic deformations of calibration targets during camera calibration, improving accuracy in scenarios where targets deform while moving.

Contribution

It proposes a low-dimensional deformation model that captures time-varying target deformations and can be optimized jointly with camera parameters.

Findings

Model effectively captures dynamic target deformations.

Significantly improves calibration accuracy with moving targets.

Enhances structure-from-motion applications.

Abstract

Most approaches to camera calibration rely on calibration targets of well-known geometry. During data acquisition, calibration target and camera system are typically moved w.r.t. each other, to allow image coverage and perspective versatility. We show that moving the target can lead to small temporary deformations of the target, which can introduce significant errors into the calibration result. While static inaccuracies of calibration targets have been addressed in previous works, to our knowledge, none of the existing approaches can capture time-varying, dynamic deformations. To achieve high-accuracy calibrations despite moving the target, we propose a way to explicitly model dynamic target deformations in camera calibration. This is achieved by using a low-dimensional deformation model with only few parameters per image, which can be optimized jointly with target poses and intrinsics. We demonstrate the effectiveness of modeling dynamic deformations using different calibration targets and show its significance in a structure-from-motion application.