An efficient correction method of wide-angle lens distortion for surveillance systems

Wide-angle or fish-eye lenses are popularly used for the surveillance system due to their large field of view (FOV). However, images obtained by wide-angle cameras tend to be nonlinearly distorted owing to lens optics. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to correct the wide-angle lens distortion for surveillance systems. Our approach is based on the FOV model, which is an efficient and simple correction method. The FOV model works well for typical wide-angle lens, whose FOV is usually smaller than 150deg. However, it begins to reveal problems as the FOV increases. First, we address two main problems of the FOV model and then improve the FOV model by refining the distortion curve. The proposed method is tested on images and videos with different FOV. Experimental results show the efficiency of our algorithm.