Removal of noise and radial lens distortion during calibration of computer vision systems

The calibration of computer vision systems that contain the camera and the projector usually utilizes markers of the well-designed patterns to calculate the system parameters. Undesirably, the noise and radial distortion exist universally, which decreases the calibration accuracy and consequently decreases the measurement accuracy of the related technology. In this paper, a method is proposed to remove the noise and radial distortion by registering the captured pattern with an ideal pattern. After the optimal modeled pattern is obtained by registration, the degree of freedom of the total calibration markers is reduced to one and both the noise and radial distortion are removed successfully. The accuracy improvement in a structured light scanning system is over 10(24) order of magnitude in the sense of mean square errors. Most importantly, the proposed method can be readily adopted by the computer vision techniques that use projectors or cameras.