Camera calibration from vanishing points in a vision system

Camera calibration has been studied for many years and there are many methods available to find the parameters precisely. However, most existing methods require information of the known scene points in general three-dimensional positions for the calibration. A simple, geometrically intuitive method is proposed. The intrinsic parameters of the camera are determined by using the vanishing points in each image. The rotation matrix of the projection matrix is computed from the vanishing and image edges and the translation matrix are obtained with additional translation motion between the viewpoints. Our approach does not need any a priori information about the cameras being used. Computer simulations and real data experiments are carried out to validate our method. © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.