A Robust Camera Self-calibration Method Based on Circular Oblique Images

Abstract. It is crucial to calibrate the camera’s intrinsic orientation elements and distortion parameters to ensure the photogrammetric accuracies. However, using nadir images to perform this task often leads to correlation between the intrinsic and extrinsic orientation elements, which will result in different camera calibration results by using different self-calibration strategies. It even has an impact on the follow-up processes and makes the product accuracy declined. To overcome this challenge, a robust camera calibration method based on circular oblique images was developed in this study. Firstly, circular oblique images with different viewing angles and camera distances were captured by unmanned aerial vehicle, following a specially designed circular flight path. Then the camera parameters were solved through the self-calibration bundle adjustment based on the circular oblique images. The experiments were carried out to compare the robustness and accuracy of nadir-image-based and circular-oblique-image-based methods. The standard deviation of focal lengths solved by different self-calibration strategies reduced from 12.99 pixels to 1.72 pixels, proving that the proposed method weakens the correlation between the intrinsic and extrinsic orientation elements and has strong robustness. The accuracy of aerial triangulation based on the camera parameters solved by the proposed method improved from 34.7 cm to 3.5cm, illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.