A new constraint on the imaged absolute conic from aspect ratio and its application

Camera self-calibration is an important task in computer vision. In the literature, if the aspect ratio is known, people need additionally zero-skew-assumption to generate a constraint on the image of the absolute conic for camera calibration. However usually camera skew is nonzero and unknown. In this paper, a new quadric constraint on the image of the absolute conic is introduced, which is solely from known aspect ratio. Its application to single-view-based calibration and reconstruction is reported to illustrate its applicability and usefulness. In addition, the new constraint is experimentally shown to be advantageous over the commonly used zero-skew-based constraint in terms of calibration accuracy. 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.