Calibration of Ultrawide Fisheye Lens Cameras by Eigenvalue Minimization

We present a new technique for calibrating ultrawide fisheye lens cameras by imposing the constraint that collinear points be rectified to be collinear, parallel lines to be parallel, and orthogonal lines to be orthogonal. Exploiting the fact that line fitting reduces to an eigenvalue problem in 3D, we do a rigorous perturbation analysis to obtain a practical calibration procedure. Doing experiments, we point out that spurious solutions exist if collinearity and parallelism alone are imposed. Our technique has many desirable properties. For example, no metric information is required about the reference pattern or the camera position, and separate stripe patterns can be displayed on a video screen to generate a virtual grid, eliminating the grid point extraction processing.