A novel optimization method of camera parameters used for vision measurement

Camera calibration plays an important role in the field of machine vision applications. During the process of camera calibration, nonlinear optimization technique is crucial to obtain the best performance of camera parameters. Currently, the existing optimization method aims at minimizing the distance error between the detected image point and the calculated back-projected image point, based on 2D image pixels coordinate. However, the vision measurement process is conducted in 3D space while the optimization method generally adopted is carried out in 2D image plane. Moreover, the error criterion with respect to optimization and measurement is different. In other words, the equal pixel distance error in 2D image plane leads to diverse 3D metric distance error at different position before the camera. All the reasons mentioned above will cause accuracy decrease for 3D vision measurement. To solve the problem, a novel optimization method of camera parameters used for vision measurement is proposed. The presented method is devoted to minimizing the metric distance error between the calculated point and the real point in 3D measurement coordinate system. Comparatively, the initial camera parameters acquired through linear calibration are optimized through two different methods: one is the conventional method and the other is the novel method presented by this paper. Also, the calibration accuracy and measurement accuracy of the parameters obtained by the two methods are thoroughly analyzed and the choice of a suitable accuracy evaluation method is discussed. Simulative and real experiments to estimate the performance of the proposed method on test data are reported, and the results show that the proposed 3D optimization method is quite efficient to improve measurement accuracy compared with traditional method. It can meet the practical requirement of high precision in 3D vision metrology engineering. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.