Improving the performance of double-plane stereo vision system calibration, using a virtual plane

Abstract

In the double-plane method for stereo vision system calibration, the correspondence between screen coordinates and location in 3D space is calculated based on four plane-to-plane transformations; there are two planes of the calibration pattern and two cameras. The method is intuitive, and easy to implement, but, the main disadvantage is ill-conditioning for some spatial locations. In this paper we propose a method which exploits the third plane which physically does not belong to the calibration pattern, but can be calculated from the set of reference points. Our algorithm uses a combination of three calibration planes, with weights which depend on screen coordinates of the point of interest; a pair of planes which could cause numerical errors receives small weights and have practically no influence on the final results. We analyse errors, and their distribution in 3D space, for the basic and the improved algorithm. Experiments demonstrate high accuracy and reliability of our method compared to the basic version; root mean square error and maximum error, are reduced by factors of 4 and 20 respectively.

Keywords

• stereo vision
• camera calibration
• double-plane method