The Calibration Method of a stereo-Vision-Based Coordinates Measurement System via a Two-Axis Turntable--The Combination of Stereo Vision and Turntable

Background: Stereo-vision-based three-dimensional coordinates measurement technology has been widely applied in the military or civil fields. There are two problems that need to be solved. The first problem is that each camera’s internal parameters and the two cameras' external parameters need to be calibrated. To increase the measurement range, usually, the turntable is used with the stereo vision system together. The second problem is the calibration of the turntable. Objective: The aim of the study is to construct and calibrate a stereo-vision-based coordinates measurement system via a two-axis turntable. Methods: Considering that the internal parameters of each camera do not change during the measurement process and the complicated optimization process of one-step self-calibration, a two-step stereo vision calibration method is proposed. In the first step, we calibrate the internal parameters of each camera through a specially designed planar target with circular points. In the second step, on the basis of the calibrated results of the internal parameters, the two cameras' external parameters are calibrated through a simple target which could be distributed in the measurement volume. For the calibration of the two-axis turntable, we calibrated the rotation axes of the turntable and the coordinates of points in the 3D space could be measured considering the non-orthogonality of the axes. Results: Some experiments are provided to examine the calibration methods we proposed. They are the plane target measurement experiments; the standard ball center coordinates measurement experiments and target pose measurement experiments. Experiment results demonstrate the superiority of the calibration method we proposed. Conclusion: We studied the calibration methods of the stereo-vision-based coordinates measurement system via a two-axis turntable. The experimental results show the measurement accuracy of our system is less than 0.1mm.