A new camera calibration method from vanishing points in a vision system

The problem of finding intrinsic parameters of a camera is extremely important for practical applications. In this paper, we present an approach for automatic estimation of intrinsic parameters from images by using the vanishing points in orthogonal directions. Firstly, image lines are extracted and clustered into groups corresponding to three dominant vanishing points. Secondly, the intrinsic parameters of the camera are determined by using the vanishing points in each image. The rotation matrix of the projection matrix is computed from the vanishing points and image edges while the translation matrix is obtained with additional translation motion between the viewpoints. Our approach does not need any prior information about the cameras being used. Experiments with real images show that our new technique is robust and accurate.