Cross-calibration of Time-of-flight and Colour Cameras

Time-of-flight cameras provide depth information, which is complementary to the photometric appearance of the scene in ordinary images. It is desirable to merge the depth and colour information, in order to obtain a coherent scene representation. However, the individual cameras will have different viewpoints, resolutions and fields of view, which means that they must be mutually calibrated. This paper presents a geometric framework for this multi-view and multi-modal calibration problem. It is shown that three-dimensional projective transformations can be used to align depth and parallax-based representations of the scene, with or without Euclidean reconstruction. A new evaluation procedure is also developed; this allows the reprojection error to be decomposed into calibration and sensor-dependent components. The complete approach is demonstrated on a network of three time-of-flight and six colour cameras. The applications of such a system, to a range of automatic scene-interpretation problems, are discussed.Comment: 18 pages, 12 figures, 3 table

A Self-calibration Algorithm Based on a Unified Framework for Constraints on Multiple Views

In this paper, we propose a new self-calibration algorithm for upgrading projective space to Euclidean space. The proposed method aims to combine the most commonly used metric constraints, including zero skew and unit aspect-ratio by formulating each constraint as a cost function within a unified framework. Additional constraints, e.g., constant principal points, can also be formulated in the same framework. The cost function is very flexible and can be composed of different constraints on different views. The upgrade process is then stated as a minimization problem which may be solved by minimizing an upper bound of the cost function. This proposed method is non-iterative. Experimental results on synthetic data and real data are presented to show the performance of the proposed method and accuracy of the reconstructed scene. © 2012 The Author(s).published_or_final_versionSpringer Open Choice, 25 May 201