Method for out-of-focus camera calibration

State-of-the-art camera calibration methods assume that the camera is at least nearly in focus and thus fail if the camera is substantially defocused. This paper presents a method which enables the accurate calibration of an out-of-focus camera. Specifically, the proposed method uses a digital display (e.g., liquid crystal display monitor) to generate fringe patterns that encode feature points into the carrier phase; these feature points can be accurately recovered, even if the fringe patterns are substantially blurred (i.e., the camera is substantially defocused). Experiments demonstrated that the proposed method can accurately calibrate a camera regardless of the amount of defocusing: the focal length difference is approximately 0.2% when the camera is focused compared to when the camera is substantially defocused.