Rectification Using Different Types of Cameras Attached to a Vehicle

The rectification process is a compulsory step in stereo matching computation. To obtain depth information, stereo camera systems are often installed in vehicles for outdoor and street-related applications, including vehicle and pedestrian detection, lane detection, and traffic sign recognition. In this paper, we propose a rectification method that uses currently available front- and rear-view vehicle cameras to produce rectified stereo images. The proposed method can be employed with different types of cameras that have varying focal lengths. In addition, this method tolerates the problem of camera alignment variation from normal stereo camera systems. To achieve this, a compensation method for different focal lengths and the estimation of image relationships are introduced. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can operate robustly and accurately with different kinds of stereo images and significantly outperforms a state-of-the-art rectification method.