Abstract. The geometric calibration of cameras becomes necessary when images should be undistorted, geometric image information is needed or data from more than one camera have to be fused. This process is often done using a target with a checkerboard or circular pattern and a given geometry. In this work, a coded checkerboard target for thermal imaging cameras and the corresponding image processing algorithm for iterative feature detection are presented. It is shown that, due in particular to the resulting better feature detectability at image borders, lower uncertainties in the estimation of the distortion parameters are achieved.