Multi-Camera Calibration Using Far-Range Dual-LED Wand and Near-Range Chessboard Fused in Bundle Adjustment

Abstract

This paper presents a calibration approach for multiple synchronized global-shutter RGB cameras surrounding a large capture volume for 3D application. The calibration approach uses an active wand with two LED-embedded markers waved manually within the target capture volume. Data from the waving wand are combined with chessboard images taken at close range during each camera’s intrinsic calibration, optimizing camera parameters via our proposed bundle adjustment method. These additional constraints from the chessboard are developed to overcome an overfitting issue of wand-based calibration discovered by benchmarking its 3D triangulation accuracy in an independent record against a ground-truth trajectory and not on the record used for calibration itself. Addressing this overfitting issue in bundle adjustment leads to significant improvements in both 3D accuracy and result consistency. As a by-product of this development, a new benchmarking workflow and our calibration dataset that reflects realistic 3D accuracy are proposed and made publicly available to allow for fair comparisons of various calibration methods in the future. Additionally, our experiment highlights a significant benefit of a ray distance-based (RDB) triangulation formula over the popular direct linear transformation (DLT) method.