Whole-field high precision point to point calibration method

•The proposed method has high calculation precision by establishing the mapping relationship between the pixel coordinates and world coordinates for each individual spatial point.•A virtual telecentric optical projection technology is proposed to encode the phase of each spatial position by loading a carrier frequency to establish a virtual world coordinate system for guaranteeing the high calculation accuracy of world coordinates of each spatial point.•Our method is closer to the real physical model employing image ray tracing technology. The proposed method has obvious advantages in monocular measurement system when the measurement system has big distortion and the measurement volume is large.•An exhaustive comparison between the proposed calibration method and the traditional 3D stereo target calibration method based on pinhole model with optimization strategy is carried out. Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed method.