Calibration of a Dual-PTZ-Camera System for Stereo Vision Based on Parallel Particle Swarm Optimization Method

This work investigates the calibration of a stereo vision system based on two PTZ (Pan-Tilt-Zoom) cameras. As the accuracy of the system depends not only on intrinsic parameters, but also on the geometric relationships between rotation axes of the cameras, the major concern is the development of an effective and systematic way to obtain these relationships. We derived a complete geometric model of the dual-PTZ-camera system and proposed a calibration procedure for the intrinsic and external parameters of the model. The calibration method is based on Zhang's approach using an augmented checkerboard composed of eight small checkerboards, and is formulated as an optimization problem to be solved by an improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) method. Two Sony EVI-D70 PTZ cameras were used for the experiments. The root-mean-square errors (RMSE) of corner distances in the horizontal and vertical direction are 0.192 mm and 0.115 mm, respectively. The RMSE of overlapped points between the small checkerboards is 1.3958 mm.