Calibration of a stereo camera system

Zusammenfassung

In the following we call a system of two cameras observing the same scene from different positions a stereo camera system. A simple way to calibrate such a stereo camera system is to calibrate each camera separately. However, the cameras of a stereo setup are not independent, since they look at the same scene from different positions. Usually this connection is utilized to solve the correspondence problem. Moreover, for pinhole cameras without distortion it can be described by a matrix called the fundamental matrix. In the next section we introduce the fundamental matrix and the constraint that a corresponding point can be determined up to a line. The theoretical background of this concept depends on the projective nature of the pinhole camera model. Any distortion of the camera is usually not mentioned in the theoretic framework. However, in optical measurement problems such distortions can not be neglected. Therefore, we define a generalized approach to the connection between two images and supply a way to calibrate a stereo camera setup which fulfills this generalized approach.