We address the problem of optical decalibration in mobile stereo camera
setups, especially in context of autonomous vehicles. In real world conditions,
an optical system is subject to various sources of anticipated and
unanticipated mechanical stress (vibration, rough handling, collisions).
Mechanical stress changes the geometry between the cameras that make up the
stereo pair, and as a consequence, the pre-calculated epipolar geometry is no
longer valid. Our method is based on optimization of camera geometry parameters
and plugs directly into the output of the stereo matching algorithm. Therefore,
it is able to recover calibration parameters on image pairs obtained from a
decalibrated stereo system with minimal use of additional computing resources.
The number of successfully recovered depth pixels is used as an objective
function, which we aim to maximize. Our simulation confirms that the method can
run constantly in parallel to stereo estimation and thus help keep the system
calibrated in real time. Results confirm that the method is able to recalibrate
all the parameters except for the baseline distance, which scales the absolute
depth readings. However, that scaling factor could be uniquely determined using
any kind of absolute range finding methods (e.g. a single beam time-of-flight
sensor).Comment: 8 pages, 9 figure
