Geometric Wide-Angle Camera Calibration: A Review and Comparative Study

TL;DR

This paper reviews and compares various geometric camera calibration tools for wide-angle cameras, providing practical guidelines and evaluating their performance with simulated and real data.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive survey of GCC tools, compares six target-based methods, and discusses future research directions for wide-angle camera calibration.

Findings

Identified strengths and weaknesses of different camera models.

Evaluated the repeatability of calibration tools.

Provided practical calibration guidelines for wide-angle cameras.

Abstract

Wide-angle cameras are widely used in photogrammetry and autonomous systems which rely on the accurate metric measurements derived from images. To find the geometric relationship between incoming rays and image pixels, geometric camera calibration (GCC) has been actively developed. Aiming to provide practical calibration guidelines, this work surveys the existing GCC tools and evaluates the representative ones for wide-angle cameras. The survey covers camera models, calibration targets, and algorithms used in these tools, highlighting their properties and the trends in GCC development. The evaluation compares six target-based GCC tools, namely, BabelCalib, Basalt, Camodocal, Kalibr, the MATLAB calibrator, and the OpenCV-based ROS calibrator, with simulated and real data for wide-angle cameras described by four parametric projection models. These tests reveal the strengths and weaknesses of these camera models, as well as the repeatability of these GCC tools. In view of the survey and evaluation, future research directions of wide-angle GCC are also discussed.