Camera calibration using principal-axes aligned conics

Abstract

The projective geometric properties of two principal-axes aligned (PAA) conics in a model plane are investigated in this paper by utilized the generalized eigenvalue decomposition (GED). We demonstrate that one constraint on the image of the absolute conic (IAC) can be obtained from a single image of two PAA conics even if their parameters are unknown. And if the eccentricity of one of the two conics is given, two constraints on the IAC can be obtained. An important merit of the algorithm using PAA is that it can be employed to avoid the ambiguities when estimating extrinsic parameters in the calibration algorithms using concentric circles. We evaluate the characteristics and robustness of the proposed algorithm in experiments with synthetic and real data.