A study on the effect of different image centres on stereo triangulation accuracy

This paper evaluates the effect of mixing the distortion centre, principal point and arithmetic image centre on the distortion correction, focal length determination and resulting real-world stereo vision triangulation. A robotic arm is used to generate a ground truth set of known positions resulting in 2078 measurements per cameras. It is seen that compared to the naive use of the arithmetic image centre improvements of 10% to 27% in triangulation accuracy can be made by determining an optimal principal point. An optimal distortion centre has a smaller but still beneficial effect.