Revisit Surround-view Camera System Calibration

Xuan Shao, Xiao Liu, Lin Zhang, Shengjie Zhao, Ying Shen, Yukai Yang

Abstract: The surround-view system is an essential component of an advanced driver assistance system especially when the vehicle runs in tight parking space or on a narrow road. To ensure successful maneuvering, a panoramic bird's-eye image with no blind spots is necessarily called for. Hence, a typical surround-view system consists of several cameras mounted around the vehicle capturing images from a top-down viewpoint, and an accurate extrinsic calibration for such system is prerequisite for providing a seamless surround-view image. To achieve this goal, this paper presents a novel extrinsic calibration pipeline which is both easy-to-use and reliable to operate on multiple cameras. Instead of taking the vehicle to a fixed position in a specific calibration site, a single chessboard is the only demand. We adopt a novel refinement procedure that jointly optimizes camera poses in a closed-loop manner. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed pipeline to calibrate a surround-view camera system has been corroborated by experiments.