A practical algorithm for automatic chessboard corner detection

Chessboard corner detection is a fundamental work of the popular chessboard pattern-based camera calibration technique. In this paper, a fast and robust algorithm for chessboard corner detection is presented. In our method, an initial corner set is obtained with an improved Hessian corner detector. And then, a novel strategy which takes both textural and geometrical characteristics of a chessboard into consideration is employed to eliminate fake corners in the initial corner set. The proposed algorithm only requires a user-input of the total number of chessboard inner corners, while all the other parameters can be adaptively calculated with a statistical approach. Experimental results on two public data sets demonstrate that the proposed method can outperform the most commonly used OpenCV method in terms of both detection rate and computational efficiency.