Study of the Error Caused by Camera Movement for the Stereo-Vision System

Abstract

The stereo-vision system plays an increasingly important role in various fields of research and applications. However, inevitable slight movements of cameras under harsh working conditions can significantly influence the 3D measurement accuracy. This paper focuses on the effect of camera movements on the stereo-vision 3D measurement. The camera movements are divided into four categories, viz., identical translations and rotations, relative translation and rotation. The error models of 3D coordinate and distance measurement are established. Experiments were performed to validate the mathematical models. The results show that the 3D coordinate error caused by identical translations increases linearly with the change in the positions of both cameras, but the distance measurement is not affected. For identical rotations, the 3D coordinate error introduced only in the rotating plane is proportional to the rotation angle within 10° while the distance error is zero. For relative translation, both coordinate and distance errors keep linearly increasing with the change in the relative positions. For relative rotation, the relationship between 3D coordinate error and rotation angle can be described as the nonlinear trend similar to a sine-cosine curve. The impact of the relative rotation angle on distance measurement accuracy does not increase monotonically. The relative rotation is the main factor compared to other cases. Even for the occurrence of a rotation angle of 10°, the resultant maximum coordinate error is up to 2000 mm, and the distance error reaches 220%. The results presented are recommended as practice guidelines to reduce the measurement errors.