Paracatadioptric camera calibration

Abstract

Catadioptric sensors refer to the combination of lens-based devices and reflective surfaces. These systems are useful because they may have a field of view which is greater than hemispherical, providing the ability to simultaneously view in any direction. Configurations which have a unique effective viewpoint are of primary interest, among these is the case where the reflective surface is a parabolic mirror and the camera is such that it induces an orthographic projection and which we call paracatadioptric. We present an algorithm for the calibration of such a device using only the images of lines in space. In fact, we show that we may obtain all of the intrinsic parameters from the images of only three lines and that this is possible without any metric information. We propose a closed-form solution for focal length, image center, and aspect ratio for skewless cameras and a polynomial root solution in the presence of skew. We also give a method for determining the orientation of a plane containing two sets of parallel lines from one uncalibrated view. Such an orientation recovery enables a rectification which is impossible to achieve in the case of a single uncalibrated view taken by a conventional camera. We study the performance of the algorithm in simulated setups and compare results on real images with an approach based on the image of the mirror's bounding circle.