A New Approach for Active Stereo Camera Calibration

By active stereo we mean a stereo vision system that allows for independent panning and tilting for each of the two cameras. One advantage of active stereo in relation to regular stereo is the former´s wider effective field of view; if an object is too close to the camera baseline, the depth to the object can still be estimated accurately by panning the cameras appropriately. Another advantage of active stereo is that it can yield a larger number of depth measurements simultaneously for each position of the platform on which the camera system is mounted. Panning and tilting over a large angular range, while being the main reason for the advantages of active stereo, also make it more challenging to calibrate such systems. For a calibration procedure to be effective for active stereo, the estimated parameters must be valid over the entire range of the pan and tilt angles. This paper presents a new approach to the calibration of such vision systems. Our method is based on the rationale that an active stereo calibration procedure must explicitly estimate the locations and the orientations of the pan and tilt rotating axes for the cameras through a closed-form solution. When these estimates for the axes are combined with the homogeneous transform relationships that link the various coordinate frames, we end with a calibration that is valid over a large variation in the pan and tilt angles.