Stereo camera calibration with an embedded calibration device and scene features

In this paper, a new stereo camera calibration technique that can realize automatic strong calibration is proposed. In order to achieve online camera calibration, an object covered with chess-board patterns, called embedded calibration device, is placed inside the cavity of the stereovision system. We estimate the structural configuration of the embedded calibration device, i.e. the 3D positions of all the grid points on the device, to calibrate the cameras. Since the device is close to the stereo camera, the calibration results are usually not valid for the volume around the object in the scene. Therefore we present a correction approach combining the embedded calibration and scene features to make the calibration valid in the scene. Experimental results demonstrate that our system performs robust and accurate, and is very applicable in unmanned systems.