An intrinsic parameters self-calibration technique for active vision system

This paper presents a new camera intrinsic parameters self-calibration technique for an ordinary active vision system. By controlling a pan-tilt-translation camera platform to do a sequence of specially designed motions, called a camera motion configuration, we rigorously proved that the camera intrinsic parameters can be determined linearly under such two configurations: 1) regulating the camera's orientation by 3 tilts, at each camera's orientation, controlling the camera to translate twice along 2 orthogonal directions; 2) regulating camera's orientation by 1 pan and 2 tilts, at each camera's orientation, controlling the camera to translate twice along 2 orthogonal directions. It is shown that the configuration 2 is robust, whereas the configuration 1 is numerically unstable and sensitive to noise. Experiments with real data were carried out and the calibration results have been verified by a stereo vision experiment. A comparison with other camera calibration approaches is also reported.