A Camera Calibration Method using Concentric Circles for Vision Applications

In this paper, we present a new method for camera calibration using concentric circles. We demonstrate that camera calibration is possible using two views of a concentric circle with known size. A new method to determine the position of the projected center of the circle is introduced. Based on the accurate estimation of the projected circle center of two sets of 3-D concentric circles, the proposed calibration method estimates the intrinsic camera parameters using two sets of 3-D concentric circles obtained from the same viewpoint. We validate the performance of the method using both synthetic and real images. Our method shows a comparable performance with respect to similar calibration methods using a plane. The use of concentric circles, however, greatly simplifies the calibration problem. We also demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed calibration method through the recovery of 3-D structure of an object, placed on a turntable, using a sequence of images taken from the static cameras.