Robust plane-based calibration of multiple non-overlapping cameras

Abstract

The availability of commodity multi-camera systems such as Google Jump, Jaunt, and Lytro Immerge have brought new demand for reliable and efficient extrinsic camera calibration. State-of-the-art solutions generally require that adjacent, if not all, cameras observe a common area or employ known scene structures. In this paper, we present a novel multi-camera calibration technique that eliminates such requirements. Our approach extends the single-pair hand-eye calibration used in robotics to multi-camera systems. Specifically, we make use of (possibly unknown) planar structures in the scene and combine plane-based structure from motion, camera pose estimation, and task-specific bundle adjustment for extrinsic calibration. Experiments on several multi-camera setups demonstrate that our scheme is highly accurate, robust, and efficient.