is Camera calibration required if I change the height of the camera - image-processing

I use single-camera calibration with checkerboard and I used one fix position of the camera to do the calibration. Now my question is if I use the same position but change the height of the camera then do I need to do calibration again? If no then will I get the same result by using the different height of the camera?
In my case, I changed the height of the camera but the position of the camera was the same. And I got a different result when I changed height. So I was wondering that may I need to do again calibration of the camera or not?
please help me out.

Generally speaking, and to achieve greatest accuracy, you will need to recalibrate the camera whenever it is moved. However, if the lens mount is rigid enough w.r.t the sensor, you may get away with only updating the extrinsic calibration, especially if your accuracy requirements are modest.
To see why this is the case notice that, unless you have a laboratory-grade rig holding and moving the camera, you can't just change the height only. With a standard tripod, for example, there will in general be a motion in all three axes amounting to a significant fraction of the sensor's size, which will be reflected in visible motion of several pixel with respect to the scene.
Things get worse / more complicated when you also add rotation to re-orient the field of view, since a mechanical mount will not, in general, rotate the camera around its optical center (i.e. the exit pupil of the lens), and therefore every rotation necessarily comes with an additional translation.
In your specific case, since you are only interested in measurements on a plane, and therefore can compute everything using homographies, refining the extrinsic calibration amounts to just recomputing the world-to-image scale. This can easily be achieved by taking one or more images of objects of known size on the plane - a calibration checkerboard is just such an object.

Related

Estimation of nodal offset with pattern and OpenCV

I was trying to do a lens calibration using OpenCV for a camera with variable zoom and focus (a broadcast camera). I managed to acquire decent parameters for a lens (focal length, k1, k2), however, I stopped at the nodal offset.
As I understand the nodal point of a lens is the point at which light rays converge. This is causing shift of a object from a camera in Z-coordinate. Basically, when I do cv::SolvePnP with my know parameters the distance from a object to camera is not exactly the same as it it in a world. For example, I completely zoomed in with a camera and put it in the focus. OpenCV can estimate that the pattern is roughly 3 meters away from a camera but when I measure it with laser measuring tool, it's 1.8 meters. This is not the case when you put lens wide because nodal offset is really small.
Question is, is there any method to measure nodal offset of the camera using a pattern and without measuring the distance of a pattern from a camera?
What I tried
I used the pan, tilt and roll tripod that can provide the rotation of the camera. I have put pattern in front of a camera and captured it several times with different angles. I was hoping I can see some difference in position when I transform pattern using a rotation from a tripod.
Also I noticed that the Unreal engine is estimating a nodal offset using a pattern by placing a CG object and aligning it with a video [link]. However I thought there is a different way how to achieve that without having a CG object.

How to improve accuracy of camera extrinsics calibration

I have a multi-camera system where the field of views are mostly non-overlapping. I have been researching on methods to calibrate the camera extrinsics and the first thing I'm going to try is to take a picture of a chessboard at a known location and use solvePnP from OpenCV to find the extrinsic rotation and translation vectors for each camera separately (following the method described in the answer here).
My problem is, this method uses only one measurement and as every measurement it is prone to errors. I assume that by taking multiple measurements, either by changing the position or the orientation of the chessboard, the accuracy can be improved. But what would be the best way to combine the rotation and translation obtained from the different measurements? A simple average?
In theory I would think that an option could be using solvePnP on all the points at the same time. Since I am calculating extrinsics the camera can't be moved so I would have to change to position and/or orientation of the board for each picture and measure the 3D points positions as accurately as possible each time.
I'm also wondering if using two chessboards in the same picture would be a possible solution, even if OpenCV doesn't seem to support multiple chessboard detection.
Is there a better way to measure extrinsics or anything that I'm missing?

Can I move my camera after intrinsic calibration?

I have 2 camera settings where the extrinsic properties between the two cameras do not matter. Generally, I start my work by calibrating each camera intrinsically and then move on to image processing.
I was just thinking - since the intrinsic calibration gives me a camera matrix that contains information on focal length, optical centre etc, as well as the distortion coefficients. From my understanding, these parameters do not change as long as the camera lenses are not adjusted. Therefore, maybe I am able to move the cameras after all?
I am thinking maybe this idea comes from my shallow understanding of the camera calibration. Please share your opinions on this matter. Thanks!
Yes, you have the correct understanding of camera calibration.
A camera's intrinsic parameters do not change if you move the camera, that is what separates the intrinsic parameters from the extrinsic ones. As you point out, the intrinsic parameters may change if you adjust the lens. Careful: depending on the lens type, simply focusing could be such a change to the lens.
There may be small influences on the intrinsic parameters from moving the camera (as the camera is not perfectly rigid) or from changing surroundings (e.g. temperature), but they are small enough to be disregarded for most use cases.

Why do we need to move the calibration object for pinhole camera calibration?

Is there any particular reason why we need multiple poses (e.g. varying z or rotation) to obtain the focal length and principal point for the camera matrix? In other words, is it sufficient to calibrate a pinhole camera with a single pose? i.e. by keeping the location of the calibration object (let's say a standard checkerboard) constant?
I assume you are asking in the context of OpenCV-like camera calibration using images of a planar target. The reference for the algorithm used by OpenCV is Z. Zhang's now classic paper . The discussion in the top half of page 6 shows that n >= 3 images are necessary for calibrating all 5 parameters of a pinhole camera matrix. Imposing constraints on the parameters reduces the number of needed images to a theoretical minimum of one.
In practice you need more for various reasons, among them:
The need to have enough measurements to overcome "noise" and "random" corner detection errors, while using a practical target with well-separated corners.
The difference between measuring data and observing (constraining) model parameters.
Practical limitations of physical lenses, e.g. depth of field.
As an example for the second point, the ideal target pose for calibrating the nonlinear lens distortion (barrel, pincushion, tangential, etc.) is frontal-facing, covering the whole field of view, because it produces a large number of well-separated and aligned corners over the image, all with approximately the same degree of blur. However, this is exactly the worst pose you can use in order to estimate the field of view / focal length, as for that purpose you need to observe significant perspective foreshortening.
Likewise, it is possible to show that the location of the principal point is well constrained by a set of images showing the vanishing points of multiple pencils of parallel lines. This is important because that location is inherently confused by the component parallel to the image plane of the relative motion between camera and target. Thus the vanishing points help "guide" the optimizer's solution toward the correct one, in the common case where the target does translate w.r.t the camera.

OpenCV - calibrate camera using static images in water

I have a photocamera mounted vertically under water in a tank, looking downwards.
There is a flat grid on the bottom of the tank (approx 2m away from the camera).
I want to be able to place markers on the bottom, and use computer vision to know their real life exact position.
So, I need to map from pixels to mm.
If I am not mistaken, cv::calibrateCamera(...) does just this, but is dependent on moving a pattern in front of the camera.
I have just static pictures of the scene, and the camera never moves in relation to the grid. Thus, I have only a "single" image to find the parameters.
How can I do this using the grid?
Thank you.
Interesting problem! The "cute" part is the effect on the intrinsic parameters of the refraction at the water-glass interface, namely to increase the focal length (or, conversely, to reduce the field of view) compared to the same lens in air. In theory, you could calibrate in air and then correct for the difference in refraction index, but calibrating directly in water is likely to give you more accurate results.
Do know your accuracy requirements? And have you verified that your lens/sensor combination is adequate to meet them (with an adequate margin)? To answer the question you need to estimate (either by calculation from the lens and sensor specifications, or experimentally using a resolution chart) whether you can resolve in an image the minimal distances required by your application.
From the wording of your question I think that you are interested only in measurements on a single plane. So you only need to (a) remove the nonlinear (barrel or pincushion) lens distortion and (b) estimate the homography between the plane of interest and the image. Once you have the latter, you can directly convert from undistorted image coordinates to world ones by matrix multiplication. Additionally if (as I imagine) the plane of interest is roughly parallel to the image plane, you should not have any problem keeping the entire field-of-view in focus.
Of course, for all of this to work as expected, you should make sure that the tank bottom is really flat, within the measurement tolerances of your application. Otherwise you are really dealing with a 3D problem, and need to modify your procedures accordingly.
The actual procedure depends a lot on the size of the tank, which you don't indicate clearly. If it's small enough that it is practical to manufacture a chessboard-like movable calibration target, by all means go for it. You may want to take a look at this other answer for suggestions. In the following I'll discuss the more interesting case in which your tank is large, e.g. the size of a swimming pool.
I'd proceed by sticking calibration markers in a regular grid at the pool bottom. I'd probably choose checker-like markers like these, maybe printing them myself with a good laser printer on plastic with an adhesive backing (assuming you can leave them in place forever). You should plan on having quite a few of them, say, an 8x8 or 10x10 grid, covering as much as possible of the field of view of the camera in its operating position and pose. To help with lining up the grid nicely you might use a laser line projector of suitable fan angle, or a laser pointer attached to a rotating support. Note carefully that it is not necessary that they be affixed in a precise X-Y grid (which may be complicated, depending on the size of your pool), only that their positions with respect any arbitrarily chosen (but fixed) three of them be known. In other words, you can attach them to the bottom approximately in a grid, then measure the distances of three extreme corners from each other as accurately as you can, thus building a base triangle, then measure the distances of all the other corners from the vertices of the triangle, and finally reconstruct their true positions with a bit of trigonometry. It's basically a surveying problem and, depending on your accuracy requirements and budget, you may want to enroll a local friendly professional surveyor (and their tools) to get it done as precisely as necessary.
Once you have your grid, you can fill the pool, get your camera, focus and f-stop the lens as needed for the application. From now on you may not touch the focus and f-stop ever again, under penalty of miscalibrating - exposure can only be controlled by the exposure time, so make sure to have enough light. Disable any and all auto-focus and auto-iris functions, if any. If the camera has a non-rigid lens mount (e.g. a DLSR), you'll need some kind of mechanical rig to ensure that the lens-body pair stay rigid. F-stop as close as you can, given the available lighting and sensor, so to have a fair bit of depth of field available. Then take several photos (~ 10) of the grid, moving and rotating the camera, and going a bit closer and farther away than your expected operating distance from the plane. You'll want to "see" in some images some significant perspective foreshortening of the grid - this is needed to accurately calibrate the focal length. Avoid JPG and any other lossy compression format when storing the images - use lossless PNG or TIFF.
Once you have the images, you can manually mark and identify the checker markers in the images. For a once-off project like this I would not bother with automatic identification, just do it manually (e.g. in Matlab, or even in Photoshop or Gimp). To help identify the markers, you could, e.g. print a number next to them. Once you have the manual marks, you can refine them automatically to subpixel accuracy, e.g. using cv::findCornerSubpix.
You're almost done. Feed the "reference" measured position of the real corners, and the observed ones in all images, to your favorite camera calibration routine, e.g. cv::calibrateCamera. You use the nominal focal length of the camera (converted to pixels) for an initial estimate, along with null distortion. If all goes well, you will obtain the camera intrinsic parameters, which you will keep, and the camera poses at all images, which you'll throw away.
Now you can mount the camera in your final setup, as needed by your application, and take one further image of the grid. Mark and refine the corner positions as before. Undistort their image positions using the distortion parameters returned by the calibration. Finally compute the homography between the reference positions of the real markers (in meters) and their undistorted positions, and you're done.
HTH
To calibrate the camera you do need multiple images of the checkerboard (or one of the other patterns found here). What you can do, is calibrate the camera outside of the water or do a calibration sequence once.
Once you have that information (focal length, center of lens, distortion, etc). You can use the solvePNP function to estimate the orientation of a single board. This estimation provides you with a distance from the camera to the board.
A completely different alternative could be to find what kind of lens the camera uses and manually fill in the data. I've not tried this, so I'm uncertain how well this would work.

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