Binocular Camera Calibration Using Rectification Error

Derek Bradley, Wolfgang Heidrich

Abstract: Reprojection error is a commonly used measure for comparing the quality of different camera calibrations, for example when choosing the best calibration from a set. While this measure is suitable for single cameras, we show that we can improve calibrations in a binocular or multi-camera setup by calibrating the cameras in pairs using a rectification error. The rectification error determines the mismatch in epipolar constraints between a pair of cameras, and it can be used to calibrate binocular camera setups more accurately than using the reprojection error. We provide a quantitative comparison of the reprojection and rectification errors, and also demonstrate our result with examples of binocular stereo reconstruction.