Self-Calibration of Stereo Cameras

Abstract

All stereo systems assume that the correct camera parameters are obtained. In fact, those parameters can be calibrated in advance using known test patterns. However, not only there is calibration errors but also some parameters are easy to change after the calibration. Even if the errors may be small, the effects on identifying corresponding points and computing distances are very large. It is infeasible to compute camera parameters every time befort? observation especially for stereo cameras which change its focus of attention by convergence or those on mobile robots which observe their environment and acquire depth information. The self-calibration of stereo cameras, which autonomously computes its current camera parameters from unknown observed data, is really necessary for real stereo systlxns. In this paper, we propose a self-calibration method based on boundary representations of a pair of stereo images.