Self-calibration of a moving zoom-lens camera by pre-calibration

We consider the problem of self-calibrating a moving camera which is equipped with a zoom lens. This consists essentially in estimating the 5 intrinsic parameters of the pinhole camera model. However, these parameters are not independent, subject to zooming. Thus, we propose to do a pre-calibration of the camera, with the aim to model the interdependence of the intrinsic parameters. We show that self-calibration then comes down to the estimation of only one intrinsic parameter. We propose a method which exploits this and which does not need an initialization of the intrinsic parameters. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.