The camera itself as a calibration pattern: a novel self-calibration method for non-central catadioptric cameras

A novel and practical self-calibration method for misaligned non-central catadioptric cameras is proposed in this paper. Without the aid of any special calibration patterns in the scene, the developed method is able to automatically estimate the pose parameters of the mirror with respect to the perspective camera. First it uses the ellipse corresponding to the mirror boundary in the image to compute the possible solutions for mirror postures. With two pose candidates, thereafter we propose a novel selection method to find the correct solution by using the image of the lens boundary. The whole calibration process is automatic and convenient to carry out since nothing more than a single image acquired from the catadioptric camera is needed. Experimental results both on synthesized and real images prove our success.