High-accuracy calibration of line-structured light vision sensors using a plane mirror

A high-accuracy calibration technique using a white paper and a front coating plane mirror is proposed in this paper for line-structured light vision sensors. This method shows advantages in two aspects. First, a white paper can gain a very high-quality light stripe due to its approximate ideal diffuse Lambertian sheet, which overcomes the problems associated with the strong reflecting light and serious burrs of the light stripe on conventional rigid targets. Second, based on a front coating plane mirror with lithographic feature points, we can obtain a bilateral symmetric structure similar to a virtual binocular stereo vision to recover the 3D coordinates of the light stripe centers on white paper with high accuracy. Front coating guarantees the coplanarity with the lithographic feature points and avoids imaging distortion caused by refraction during back coating. Therefore, front coating can be used to obtain high accuracy structural parameters of the virtual binocular stereo vision sensors. Meanwhile, for the light stripe and its image in the plane mirror are auto-epipolar with all the epipolar lines arranged in parallel. These lines intersect at a vanishing point in the camera image, and this epipolar constraint is used to complete the matching of the light stripe centers without the need for the camera parameters. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.