Camera Calibration and 3-D Measurement with an Active Stereo Vision System for Handling Moving Objects

In this paper, we propose a fast and easy camera calibration and 3-D measurement method with an active stereo vision system for handling moving objects whose geometric models are known. We adopt the stereo vision system that can change its direction to follow the moving objects. To gain the extrinsic camera parameters in real time, a baseline stereo camera (parallel stereo camera) model and a projective transformation of stereo images are utilized by considering the epipolar constraints. To make use of 3-D measurement results of the moving object, the manipulator hand approaches the object. When the manipulator hand and the object are near enough for them to be in a single image, a very accurate camera calibration can be executed to calculate the manipulator size in the image. Our method does not need complicated image processing and can measure 3-D position and orientation of the object fast.