The effect of measurement noise on intrinsic camera calibration parameters

The camera calibration matrix captures the transformation of a 3D point onto a 2D image plane as occurs in the camera being used for imaging. Given the world coordinates of a number of precisely placed points in a 3D space, camera calibration requires the measurement of the 2D projection of those scene points on the image plane. While the coordinates of the points in SD space can be measured precisely, the image coordinates that are determined from the digital image are not precise mainly because of measurement noise. In this paper, we derive analytical relationships between the errors in the intrinsic camera parameters (ICPs) due to error in measurements. We show that the errors in the ICPs are Gaussian distributed when the measurement noise is Gaussian. We verify these results experimentally.