Non-metric calibration of camera lens distortion

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of calibrating camera lens distortion, which can be significant in medium to wide angle lenses. Our approach is based on the analysis of distorted images of straight lines. We derive a new distortion measure that can be optimized using nonlinear search techniques to find the best distortion parameters that straighten these lines. Unlike the other existing approaches, we also show how to use this measure to find fast, closed-form solutions to the distortion coefficients. Some experiments to evaluate the performance of this approach on synthetic and real data are reported.