A Comparison between 2d Plate Calibration and Wand Calibration for 3d Kinematic Systems

Compared to a 2D plate camera calibration and a traditional 3D calibration cage, it is generally regarded that a wand-based camera calibration of 3D photogrammetric systems is more user-friendly. Not surprisingly, nowadays commercially available 3D kinematic systems for a human motion analysis are offering almost exclusively a wand calibration. Still a 2D calibration plate is continuously used in a number of other applications and it has potential advantages over the wand. However, there appears to be no published work comparing a 2D plate and a wand calibration, at least when it comes to the commercially available 3D kinematic systems. Therefore, in this work we compared a 2D plate calibration and wand calibration for a typical and very popular 3D kinematic system. We demonstrated that there was basically no difference in the reconstruction accuracy and additionally most qualitative issues were, as a rule, favorable to a wand calibration.