How do you determine that the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters you have calculated for a camera at time X are still valid at time Y?
My idea would be
to use a known calibration object (a chessboard) and place it in the camera's field of view at time Y.
Calculate the chessboard corner points in the camera's image (at time Y).
Define one of the chessboard corner points as world origin and calculate the world coordinates of all remaining chessboard corners based on that origin.
Relate the coordinates of 3. with the camera coordinate system.
Use the parameters calculated at time X to calculate the image points of the points from 4.
Calculate distances between points from 2. with points from 5.
Is that a clever way to go about it? I'd eventually like to implement it in MATLAB and later possibly openCV. I think I'd know how to do steps 1)-2) and step 6). Maybe someone can give a rough implementation for steps 2)-5). Especially I'd be unsure how to relate the "chessboard-world-coordinate-system" with the "camera-world-coordinate-system", which I believe I would have to do.
Thanks!
If you have a single camera you can easily follow the steps from this article:
Evaluating the Accuracy of Single Camera Calibration
For achieving step 2, you can easily use detectCheckerboardPoints function from MATLAB.
[imagePoints, boardSize, imagesUsed] = detectCheckerboardPoints(imageFileNames);
Assuming that you are talking about stereo-cameras, for stereo pairs, imagePoints(:,:,:,1) are the points from the first set of images, and imagePoints(:,:,:,2) are the points from the second set of images. The output contains M number of [x y] coordinates. Each coordinate represents a point where square corners are detected on the checkerboard. The number of points the function returns depends on the value of boardSize, which indicates the number of squares detected. The function detects the points with sub-pixel accuracy.
As you can see in the following image the points are estimated relative to the first point that covers your third step.
[The image is from this page at MATHWORKS.]
You can consider point 1 as the origin of your coordinate system (0,0). The directions of the axes are shown on the image and you know the distance between each point (in the world coordinate), so it is just the matter of depth estimation.
To find a transformation matrix between the points in the world CS and the points in the camera CS, you should collect a set of points and perform an SVD to estimate the transformation matrix.
But,
I would estimate the parameters of the camera and compare them with the initial parameters at time X. This is easier, if you have saved the images that were used when calibrating the camera at time X. By repeating the calibrating process using those images you should get very similar results, if the camera calibration is still valid.
Edit: Why you need the set of images used in the calibration process at time X?
You have a set of images to do the calibrations for the first time, right? To recalibrate the camera you need to use a new set of images. But for checking the previous calibration, you can use the previous images. If the parameters of the camera are changes, there would be an error between the re-estimation and the first estimation. This can be used for evaluating the validity of the calibration not for recalibrating the camera.
Related
I am writing a program that captures real time images from a scene by two calibrated cameras (so the internal parameters of the cameras are known to us). Using two view geometry, I can find the essential matrix and use OpenCV or MATLAB to find the relative position and orientation of one camera with respect to another. Having the essential matrix, it is shown in Hartley and Zisserman's Multiple View Geometry that one can reconstruct the scene using triangulation up to scale. Now I want to use a reference length to determine the scale of reconstruction and resolve ambiguity.
I know the height of the front wall and I want to use it for determining the scale of reconstruction to measure other objects and their dimensions or their distance from the center of my first camera. How can it be done in practice?
Thanks in advance.
Edit: To add more information, I have already done linear trianglation (minimizing the algebraic error) but I am not sure if it is any useful because there is still a scale ambiguity that I don't know how to get rid of it. My ultimate goal is to recognize an object (like a Pepsi can) and separate it in a rectangular area (which is going to be written as a separate module by someone else) and then find the distance of each pixel in this rectangular area, i.e. the region of interest, to the camera. Then the distance from the camera to the object will be the minimum of the distances from the camera to the 3D coordinates of the pixels in the region of interest.
Might be a bit late, but at least for someone struggling with the same staff.
As far as I remember it is actually linear problem. You got essential matrix, which gives you rotation matrix and normalized translation vector specifying relative position of cameras. If you followed Hartley and Zissermanm you probably chose one of the cameras as origin of world coordinate system. Meaning all your triangulated points are in normalized distance from this origin. What is important is, that the direction of every triangulated point is correct.
If you have some reference in the scene (lets say height of the wall), then you just have to find this reference (2 points are enough - so opposite ends of the wall) and calculate "normalization coefficient" (sorry for terminology) as
coeff = realWorldDistanceOf2Points / distanceOfTriangulatedPoints
Once you have this coeff, just mulptiply all your triangulated points with it and you got real world points.
Example:
you know that opposite corners of the wall are 5m from each other. you find these corners in both images, triangulate them (lets call triangulated points c1 and c2), calculate their distance in the "normalized" world as ||c1 - c2|| and get the
coeff = 5 / ||c1 - c2||
and you get real 3d world points as triangulatedPoint*coeff.
Maybe easier option is to have both cameras in fixed relative position and calibrate them together by stereoCalibrate openCV/Matlab function (there is actually pretty nice GUI in Matlab for that) - it returns not just intrinsic params, but also extrinsic. But I don't know if this is your case.
I'm receiving depth images of a tof camera via MATLAB. the delivered drivers of the tof camera to compute x,y,z coordinates out of the depth image are using openCV function, which are implemented in MATLAB via mex-files.
But later on I can't use those drivers anymore nor use openCV functions, therefore I need to implement the 2d to 3d mapping on my own including the compensation of radial distortion. I already got hold of the camera parameters and the computation of the x,y,z coordinates of each pixel of the depth image is working. Until now I am solving the implicit equations of the undistortion via the newton method (which isn't really fast...). But I want to implement the undistortion of the openCV function.
... and there is my problem: I dont really understand it and I hope you can help me out there. how is it actually working? I tried to search through the forum, but havent found any useful threads concerning this case.
greetings!
The equations of the projection of a 3D point [X; Y; Z] to a 2D image point [u; v] are provided on the documentation page related to camera calibration :
(source: opencv.org)
In the case of lens distortion, the equations are non-linear and depend on 3 to 8 parameters (k1 to k6, p1 and p2). Hence, it would normally require a non-linear solving algorithm (e.g. Newton's method, Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm, etc) to inverse such a model and estimate the undistorted coordinates from the distorted ones. And this is what is used behind function undistortPoints, with tuned parameters making the optimization fast but a little inaccurate.
However, in the particular case of image lens correction (as opposed to point correction), there is a much more efficient approach based on a well-known image re-sampling trick. This trick is that, in order to obtain a valid intensity for each pixel of your destination image, you have to transform coordinates in the destination image into coordinates in the source image, and not the opposite as one would intuitively expect. In the case of lens distortion correction, this means that you actually do not have to inverse the non-linear model, but just apply it.
Basically, the algorithm behind function undistort is the following. For each pixel of the destination lens-corrected image do:
Convert the pixel coordinates (u_dst, v_dst) to normalized coordinates (x', y') using the inverse of the calibration matrix K,
Apply the lens-distortion model, as displayed above, to obtain the distorted normalized coordinates (x'', y''),
Convert (x'', y'') to distorted pixel coordinates (u_src, v_src) using the calibration matrix K,
Use the interpolation method of your choice to find the intensity/depth associated with the pixel coordinates (u_src, v_src) in the source image, and assign this intensity/depth to the current destination pixel.
Note that if you are interested in undistorting the depthmap image, you should use a nearest-neighbor interpolation, otherwise you will almost certainly interpolate depth values at object boundaries, resulting in unwanted artifacts.
The above answer is correct, but do note that UV coordinates are in screen space and centered around (0,0) instead of "real" UV coordinates.
Source: own re-implementation using Python/OpenGL. Code:
def correct_pt(uv, K, Kinv, ds):
uv_3=np.stack((uv[:,0],uv[:,1],np.ones(uv.shape[0]),),axis=-1)
xy_=uv_3#Kinv.T
r=np.linalg.norm(xy_,axis=-1)
coeff=(1+ds[0]*(r**2)+ds[1]*(r**4)+ds[4]*(r**6));
xy__=xy_*coeff[:,np.newaxis]
return (xy__#K.T)[:,0:2]
I am using Camera Calibration Toolbox for Matlab. After calibration I have intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of stereo camera system. Next, I would like to determine the distance between the camera system and the object. To get this information, I used the function stereo_triangulation which is included in the Toolbox. Input are two matrixes including pixel coordinates of correspondences in the left and right image.
I tried to get coordinates of correspondences with using of Basic Block Matching method which is described in Matlab's help for Stereo Vision.
Resolution of my pictures is 1280x960 pixels. I know that the biggest disparity is around 520 pixels. I set the maximum of disparity range to 520. But then determine the coordinates takes ages. It is not possible use in practice. Calculating of disparity map is much faster with using of Matlab's function disparity(). But I want the step before - coordinates of correspondences.
Please can you suggest how can I effectively get the coordinates with Matlab?
Disparity and 3D are related by simple formulas (see below) so the time for calculating 3D data and disparity map should be the same. The notation is
f - focal length in pixels,
B - separation between cameras,
u, v - row and column in the system centered on the middle of the image,
d-disparity,
x, y, z - 3D coordinates.
z=f*B/d;
x=z*u/f;
y=z*v/f;
1280x960 is too large resolution for any correlation stereo to work in real time. Think about it: you have to loop over a 2d image, over 2d correlation window and over the range of disparities. This means 5 embedded loops! I don't work with Matlab anymore but I know that it is quite slow.
When showing the extrinsic parameters of calibration (the 3D model including the camera position and the position of the calibration checkerboards), the toolbox does not include units for the axes. It seemed logical to assume that they are in mm, but the z values displayed can not possibly be correct if they are indeed in mm. I'm assuming that there is some transformation going on, perhaps having to do with optical coordinates and units, but I can't figure it out from the documentation. Has anyone solved this problem?
If you marked the side length of your squares in mm, then the z-distance shown would be in mm.
I know next to nothing about matlabs (not entirely true but i avoid matlab wherever I can, and that would be almost always possible) tracking utilities but here's some general info.
Pixel dimension on the sensor has nothing to do with the size of the pixel on screen, or in model space. For all purposes a camera produces a picture that has no meaningful units. A tracking process is unaware of the scale of the scene. (the perspective projection takes care of that). You can re insert a scale by taking 2 tracked points and measuring the distance between those points. This is the solver spaces distance is pretty much arbitrary. Now if you know the real distance between these points you can get a conversion factor. By doing:
real distance / solver space distance.
There's really now way to knowing this distance form the cameras settings as the camera is unable to differentiate between different scales of scenes. So a perfect 1:100 replica is no different for the solver than the real deal. So you must allays relate to something you can measure separately for each measuring session. The camera always produces something that's relative in nature.
I have N 3D observations taken from an optical motion capture system in XYZ form.
The motion that was captured was just a simple circle arc, derived from a rigid body with fixed axis of rotation.
I used the princomp function in matlab to get all marker points on the same plane i.e. the plane on which the motion has been done.
(See a pic representing 3D data on the plane that was found, below)
What i want to do after the previous step is to look the fitted data on the plane that was found and get the curve of the captured motion in 2D.
In the princomp how to, it is said that
The first two coordinates of the principal component scores give the
projection of each point onto the plane, in the coordinate system of
the plane.
(from "Fitting an Orthogonal Regression Using Principal Components Analysis" article on mathworks help site)
So i thought that if i just plot those pc scores -plot(score(:,1),score(:,2))- i'll get the motion curve. Instead what i got is this.
(See a pic representing curve data in 2D derived from pc scores, below)
The 2d curve seems stretched and nonlinear (different y values for same x values) when it shouldn't be. The curve that i am looking for, should be interpolated by just using simple polynomial (polyfit) or circle fit in matlab.
Is this happening because the plane that was found looks like rhombus relative to the original coordinate system and the pc axes are rotated with respect to the basis of plane in such way that produce this stretch?
Then i thought that, this is happening because of the different coordinate systems of optical system and Matlab. Optical system's (ie cameras) co.sys. is XZY oriented and Matlab's default (i think) co.sys is XYZ oriented. I transformed my data to correspond to Matlab's co.sys through a rotation matrix, run again princomp but i got the same stretch in the 2D curve (the new curve just had different orientation now).
Somewhere else i read that
Principal Components Analysis chooses the first PCA axis as that line
that goes through the centroid, but also minimizes the square of the
distance of each point to that line. Thus, in some sense, the line is
as close to all of the data as possible. Equivalently, the line goes
through the maximum variation in the data. The second PCA axis also
must go through the centroid, and also goes through the maximum
variation in the data, but with a certain constraint: It must be
completely uncorrelated (i.e. at right angles, or "orthogonal") to PCA
axis 1.
I know that i am missing something but i have a problem understanding why i get a stretched curve. What i have to do so i can get the curve right?
Thanks in advance.
EDIT: Here is a sample data file (3 columns XYZ coords for 2 markers)
w w w.sendspace.com/file/2hiezc