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A Distributed Calibration Algorithm for Color and Range Camera Networks

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Robot Operating System (ROS)

Part of the book series: Studies in Computational Intelligence ((SCI,volume 625))

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Abstract

In this tutorial chapter we present a package to calibrate multi-device vision systems such as camera networks or robots. The proposed approach is able to estimate—in a unique and consistent reference frame—the rigid displacements of all the sensors in a network of standard cameras, Kinect-like depth sensors and Time-of-Flight range sensors. The sensor poses can be estimated in a few minutes with a user-friendly procedure: the user is only asked to move a checkerboard around while the ROS nodes acquire the data and perform the calibration. To make the system scalable, the data analysis is distributed in the network. This results in a low bandwidth usage as well as a really fast calibration procedure. The ROS package is available on GitHub within the repository iaslab-unipd/calibration_toolkit (https://github.com/iaslab-unipd/calibration_toolkit). The package has been developed for ROS Indigo in C++11 and Python, and tested on PCs equipped with Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://openptrack.org/.

  2. 2.

    http://wiki.ros.org/openni_kinect/kinect_accuracy.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Prof. Mohamed Chetouani, Salvatore Maria Anzalone and Stéphane Michelet from Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie (UPMC) and the Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique (ISIR) for their support and help.

The authors would also like to thank Jeff Burke, Alexander Horn and Randy Illum from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) for the extensive collaboration in designing and testing the calibration methods during the development of OpenPTrack [15]. OpenPTrack has been sponsored by UCLA REMAP and Open Perception. Key collaborators include the University of Padova and Electroland. Portions of the work have been supported by the National Science Foundation (IIS-1323767).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IAS-Lab, Department of Information Engineering (DEI), University of Padova, Via Ognissanti 72, 35131, Padova, Italy

    Filippo Basso, Riccardo Levorato, Matteo Munaro & Emanuele Menegatti

Authors
  1. Filippo Basso
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  2. Riccardo Levorato
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  3. Matteo Munaro
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  4. Emanuele Menegatti
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Filippo Basso .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Prince Sultan University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

    Anis Koubaa

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Basso, F., Levorato, R., Munaro, M., Menegatti, E. (2016). A Distributed Calibration Algorithm for Color and Range Camera Networks. In: Koubaa, A. (eds) Robot Operating System (ROS). Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 625. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26054-9_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26054-9_16

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-26052-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-26054-9

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