Accurate Feature Extraction and Control Point Correction for Camera Calibration with a Mono-Plane Target

The paper addresses two problems related to 3D camera calibration using a single mono-plane calibration target with circular control marks. The first problem is how to compute accurately the locations of the features (ellipses) in images of the target. Since the structure of the control marks is known beforehand, we propose to use a shape-specific searching technique to find the optimal locations of the features. Our experiments have shown this technique generates more accurate feature locations than the state-of-the-art ellipse extraction methods. The second problem is how to refine the control mark locations with unknown manufacturing errors. We demonstrate in a case study, where the control marks are laser printed on a A4 paper, that the manufacturing errors of the control marks can be compensated to a good extent so that the remaining calibration errors are reduced significantly. 1

Nonlinear structure tensors

In this article we introduce nonlinear versions of the popular structure tensor, also known as second moment matrix. These nonlinear structure tensors replace the Gaussian smoothing of the classical structure tensor by discontinuity-preserving nonlinear diffusions. While nonlinear diffusion is a well-established tool for scalar and vector-valued data, it has not often been used for tensor images so far. Two types of nonlinear diffusion processes for tensor data are studied: an isotropic one with a scalar-valued diffusivity, and its anisotropic counterpart with a diffusion tensor. We prove that these schemes preserve the positive semidefiniteness of a matrix field and are therefore appropriate for smoothing structure tensor fields. The use of diffusivity functions of total variation (TV) type allows us to construct nonlinear structure tensors without specifying additional parameters compared to the conventional structure tensor. The performance of nonlinear structure tensors is demonstrated in three fields where the classic structure tensor is frequently used: orientation estimation, optic flow computation, and corner detection. In all these cases the nonlinear structure tensors demonstrate their superiority over the classical linear one. Our experiments also show that for corner detection based on nonlinear structure tensors, anisotropic nonlinear tensors give the most precise localisation