Tsai camera calibration enhanced

The rise of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for surveying and sensing tasks have created new challenges for quick calibration of sensing systems, which we feel is a critical issue. In this context, calibration is performed often and needs to be achieved as quickly as possible. An approach with minimal user-interaction, which preserves sensing accuracy would be ideal. We propose a version of Tsai´s camera calibration with an improved distortion model and two non-linear optimization phases to calibrate our UAV equipped with a stereo-camera system. We trialled our proposed calibration approach against three known reconstruction pipelines: an un-calibrated pipeline, a pipeline calibrated using Zhang´s approach and a pipeline calibrated using Tsai´s original approach. Our findings indicate that our approach has competitive accuracy, while requiring far less user-interaction than Zhang´s approach.