Camera Calibration Method for Far Range Stereovision Sensors Used in Vehicles

This paper presents a camera calibration method for far-range stereo-vision used for driving environment perception on highways. For a high accuracy stereovision system the most critical camera parameters are the relative extrinsic parameters which are describing the geometry of the stereo-rig. Experiments proved that even a few seconds drift of the relative camera angles can lead to disastrous consequences in the whole stereo-vision process: incorrect epipolar lines and consequently lack of reconstructed 3D points. Therefore we propose an off-line method able to give a very accurate estimation of these parameters and on-line methods for monitoring their stability in time taking into account the real-world automotive conditions, which can introduce drifts to the initial parameters due vibrations, temperature variations etc