DeepPTZ: Deep Self-Calibration for PTZ Cameras

Rotating and zooming cameras, also called PTZ (Pan-Tilt-Zoom) cameras, are widely used in modern surveillance systems. While their zooming ability allows acquiring detailed images of the scene, it also makes their calibration more challenging since any zooming action results in a modification of their intrinsic parameters. Therefore, such camera calibration has to be computed online; this process is called self-calibration. In this paper, given an image pair captured by a PTZ camera, we propose a deep learning based approach to automatically estimate the focal length and distortion parameters of both images as well as the rotation angles between them. The proposed approach relies on a dual-Siamese structure, imposing bidirectional constraints. The proposed network is trained on a large-scale dataset automatically generated from a set of panoramas. Empirically, we demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves competitive performance with respect to both deep learning based and traditional state-of-the art methods. Our code and model will be publicly available at https://github.com/ChaoningZhang/DeepPTZ.