Automatic camera system calibration with a chessboard enabling full image coverage

Abstract. Geometric camera calibration is a mandatory prerequisite for many applications in computer vision and photogrammetry. Especially when requiring an accurate camera model the effort for calibration can increase dramatically. For the calibration of the stereo-camera used for optical navigation a new chessboard based approach is presented. It is derived from different parts of existing approaches which, taken separately, are not able to meet the requirements. Moreover, the approach adds one novel main feature: It is able to detect all visible chessboard fields with the help of one or more fiducial markers simply sticked on a chessboard (AprilTags). This allows a robust detection of one or more chessboards in a scene, even from extreme perspectives. Except for the acquisition of the calibration images the presented approach enables a fully automatic calibration. Together with the parameters of the interior and relative orientation the full covariance matrix of all model parameters is calculated and provided, allowing a consistent error propagation in the whole processing chain of the imaging system. Even though the main use case for the approach is a stereo camera system it can be used for a multi-camera system with any number of cameras mounted on a rigid frame.