New linear camera self-calibration technique

A new active vision based linear camera self-calibration technique is proposed. By an active vision system, the camera is rigidly mounted on a camera platform and the platform can be controlled to undergo precise motions. The novelty of this new calibration technique is that it can determine linearly all the five intrinsic parameters of the camera. The basic principle of the new calibration technique is to control the camera to undergo at least five sets of orthogonal planar motions, then the camera's intrinsic parameters can be linearly determined via epipoles. In addition, since the fundamental matrix must be of an anti-symmetric one if the camera's motion between the two images is a pure translation, a 2-point algorithm, rather than the traditional 8-point algorithm, is used to determine the fundamental matrix. The 2-point algorithm is proved to be a great contributor to the substantial increases of the robustness and accuracy of the final calibration results with a large number of experiments on synthetic and real images.