Camera Calibration by Vanishing Lines for 3-D Computer Vision

A new approach to camera calibration by vanishing lines is proposed. Calibrated parameters include the orientation, the position, and the focal length of a camera. A hexagon is employed as the calibration target to generate a vanishing line of the ground plane from its projected image. It is shown that the vanishing line includes useful geometric hints about the camera orientation parameters and the focal length, from which the orientation parameters can be solved easily and analytically. And the camera position parameters can be calibrated by the use of related geometric projective relationships. The simplicity of the target eliminates the complexity of the environment setup and simplifies the feature extraction in relevant image processing. The calibration formulas are also simple to compute. Experimental results show the feasibility of the proposed approach.