Online Camera-Gyroscope Autocalibration for Cell Phones

The gyroscope is playing a key role in helping estimate 3D camera rotation for various vision applications on cell phones, including video stabilization and feature tracking. Successful fusion of gyroscope and camera data requires that the camera, gyroscope, and their relative pose to be calibrated. In addition, the timestamps of gyroscope readings and video frames are usually not well synchronized. Previous paper performed camera-gyroscope calibration and synchronization offline after the entire video sequence has been captured with restrictions on the camera motion, which is unnecessarily restrictive for everyday users to run apps that directly use the gyroscope. In this paper, we propose an online method that estimates all the necessary parameters, whereas a user is capturing video. Our contributions are: simultaneous online camera self-calibration and camera-gyroscope calibration based on an implicit extended Kalman filter and generalization of the multiple-view coplanarity constraint on camera rotation in a rolling shutter camera model for cell phones. The proposed method is able to estimate the needed calibration and synchronization parameters online with all kinds of camera motion and can be embedded in gyro-aided applications, such as video stabilization and feature tracking. Both Monte Carlo simulation and cell phone experiments show that the proposed online calibration and synchronization method converge fast to the ground truth values.