Differential methods for nonmetric 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 new distortion measures that can be optimized using non-linear search techniques to find the best distortion parameters that straighten these lines. Unlike other approaches, we also provide fast, closed-form solutions to the distortion coefficients. Experiments to evaluate the performance of this approach on synthetic and real data are reported.