Subtleties of extrinsic calibration of cameras with non-overlapping fields of view

Abstract

Abstract The calibration of the relative pose between rigidly connected cameras with non-overlapping fields of view (FOV) is a prerequisite for many applications. In this paper, the subtleties of the experimental realization of such calibration optimization methods like in (Z. Liu, et al., Measurement Science and Technology, 2011, Z. Li, V. Willert, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), 2018) are presented. Two strategies that could be adapted to certain optimization processes to find better local minima are evaluated. The first strategy is a careful measurement acquisition of pose pairs for solving the calibration problem, which improves the accuracy of the initial value for the following non-linear refinement. The second strategy is the introduction of a quality measure for the image data used for the calibration, which is based on the projection size of the known planar calibration patterns on the image. We show that introducing an additional weighting to the optimization objective chosen as a function of that quality measure improves calibration accuracy and increases robustness against noise. The above strategies are integrated into different setups and their improvement is demonstrated both in simulation and real-world experiment.