Self-calibration of radially symmetric distortion by model selection

For self-calibration of general radially symmetric distortion (RSD) of omnidirectional cameras such as fish-eye lenses, calibration parameters are usually estimated so that curved lines, which are supposed to be straight in the real-world, are mapped to straight lines in the calibrated image, which is assumed to be taken by an ideal pin-hole camera. In this paper, a method of calibrating RSD is introduced base on the notion of principal component analysis (PCA). In the proposed method, the distortion function, which maps a distorted image to an ideal pin-hole camera image, is assumed to be a linear combination of a certain class of basis functions, and an algorithm for solving its coefficients by using line patterns is given. Then a method of selecting good basis functions is proposed, which aims to realize appropriate calibration in practice. Experimental results for synthetic data and real images are presented to demonstrate the performance of our calibration method.