Perceiving Systems Autonomous Vision Conference Paper 2014

Calibrating and Centering Quasi-Central Catadioptric Cameras

Schoenbein

Non-central catadioptric models are able to cope with irregular camera setups and inaccuracies in the manufacturing process but are computationally demanding and thus not suitable for robotic applications. On the other hand, calibrating a quasi-central (almost central) system with a central model introduces errors due to a wrong relationship between the viewing ray orientations and the pixels on the image sensor. In this paper, we propose a central approximation to quasi-central catadioptric camera systems that is both accurate and efficient. We observe that the distance to points in 3D is typically large compared to deviations from the single viewpoint. Thus, we first calibrate the system using a state-of-the-art non-central camera model. Next, we show that by remapping the observations we are able to match the orientation of the viewing rays of a much simpler single viewpoint model with the true ray orientations. While our approximation is general and applicable to all quasi-central camera systems, we focus on one of the most common cases in practice: hypercatadioptric cameras. We compare our model to a variety of baselines in synthetic and real localization and motion estimation experiments. We show that by using the proposed model we are able to achieve near non-central accuracy while obtaining speed-ups of more than three orders of magnitude compared to state-of-the-art non-central models.

Author(s): Miriam Schoenbein and Tobias Strauss and Andreas Geiger
Book Title: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
Pages: 4443 - 4450
Year: 2014
Month: June
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (conference)
Address: Hong Kong, China
DOI: 10.1109/ICRA.2014.6907507
Event Name: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
Event Place: Hong Kong, China
Electronic Archiving: grant_archive
Attachments:

BibTex

@conference{Schoenbein2014ICRA,
  title = {Calibrating and Centering Quasi-Central Catadioptric Cameras},
  booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation},
  abstract = {Non-central catadioptric models are able to cope with irregular camera setups and inaccuracies in the manufacturing process but are computationally demanding and thus not suitable for robotic applications. On the other hand, calibrating a quasi-central (almost central) system with a central model introduces errors due to a wrong relationship between the viewing ray orientations and the pixels on the image sensor. In this paper, we propose a central approximation to quasi-central catadioptric camera systems that is both accurate and efficient. We observe that the distance to points in 3D is typically large compared to deviations from the single viewpoint. Thus, we first calibrate the system using a state-of-the-art non-central camera model. Next, we show that by remapping the observations we are able to match the orientation of the viewing rays of a much simpler single viewpoint model with the true ray orientations. While our approximation is general and applicable to all quasi-central camera systems, we focus on one of the most common cases in practice: hypercatadioptric cameras. We compare our model to a variety of baselines in synthetic and real localization and motion estimation experiments. We show that by using the proposed model we are able to achieve near non-central accuracy while obtaining speed-ups of more than three orders of magnitude compared to state-of-the-art non-central models.},
  pages = {4443 - 4450},
  address = {Hong Kong, China},
  month = jun,
  year = {2014},
  slug = {schoenbein2014icra},
  author = {Schoenbein, Miriam and Strauss, Tobias and Geiger, Andreas},
  month_numeric = {6}
}