Automatic, fast, online calibration between depth and color cameras

• Published in: Journal of visual communication and image representation Vol. 25; no. 1; pp. 218 - 226
• Main Authors: Mikhelson, Ilya V., Lee, Philip G., Sahakian, Alan V., Wu, Ying, Katsaggelos, Aggelos K.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01-01-2014
• Subjects: Automatic; Calibration; Color cameras; Depth cameras; Fast; Online; Point cloud; Point correspondence; Color cameras; Point cloud; Point correspondence; Calibration; Depth cameras; Online; Fast; Automatic
• ISSN: 1047-3203; 1095-9076
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jvcir.2013.03.010

•Automatic, online calibration between a color camera and a depth camera.•No special equipment; just a square, checkered target.•Calibration occurs very quickly and with minimal user interaction.•Online calibration allows user to see results immediately.•Rigorous ground truth validation places this algorithm at leading edge.
Automatic camera calibration has remained a hard topic in computer vision since its inception due to its reliance on the image correspondence problem. This problem becomes even more pronounced when calibrating a depth image with a color image due to a lack of simple correspondences between the two modalities. In this work, we develop a completely automatic, very fast, online algorithm that demonstrates how a consumer-grade depth camera can be calibrated with a color camera with minimal user interaction.