An effective method for extrinsic calibration of network cameras with non-overlapping field of views

This paper proposes an effective method for determining the extrinsic parameters (the locations and orientations of the cameras in a relative coordinate system), named as extrinsic calibration, for sparse network cameras, which are commonly utilized for covering much larger area. The proposed method formulates the problem as a Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) estimation, and calculates the parameters with Newton-Raphson algorithm based on the cameras´ observations of an object freely moving in the cameras´ field of views. One of the method´s advantages is that it significantly decreases the computation time, since a step length is properly chosen and put in Newton-Raphson algorithm. The results herein demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art approaches based on the classical evaluation metric in simulation experiments.