Distributed Smart Camera Calibration Using Blinking LED

Smart camera networks are very powerful for various computer vision applications. As a preliminary step in the application, every camera in the scene needs to be calibrated. For most of the calibration algorithms, image point correspondences are needed. Therefore, easy to detect objects can be used like LEDs. Unfortunately, existing LED based calibration methods are highly sensitive to lighting conditions and only perform well in dark conditions. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a robust LED detection method for the calibration process. The main contribution to the robustness of our algorithm is the blinking behavior of the LED, enabling the use of temporal pixel information. Experiments show that accurate LED detection is already possible for a sequence length of three frames. A distributed implementation on a truly embedded smart camera is performed. Finally, a successful spatial calibration is performed with this implemented method.