On-site semi-automatic calibration and registration of a projector-camera system using arbitrary objects with known geometry

Abstract

In the Shader Lamps concept, a projector-camera system augments physical objects with projected virtual textures, provided that a precise intrinsic and extrinsic calibration of the system is available. Calibrating such systems has been an elaborate and lengthy task in the past and required a special calibration apparatus. Self-calibration methods in turn are able to estimate calibration parameters automatically with no effort. However they inherently lack global scale and are fairly sensitive to input data. We propose a new semi-automatic calibration approach for projector-camera systems that - unlike existing auto-calibration approaches - additionally recovers the necessary global scale by projecting on an arbitrary object of known geometry. To this end our method combines surface registration with bundle adjustment optimization on points reconstructed from structured light projections to refine a solution that is computed from the decomposition of the fundamental matrix. In simulations on virtual data and experiments with real data we demonstrate that our approach estimates the global scale robustly and is furthermore able to improve incorrectly guessed intrinsic and extrinsic calibration parameters thus outperforming comparable metric rectification algorithms.