Single view camera calibration for augmented virtual environments

Augmented Virtual Environments (AVE) are very effective in the application of surveillance, in which multiple video streams are projected onto a 3D urban model for better visualization and comprehension of the dynamic scenes. One of the key issues in creating such systems is to estimate the parameters of each camera including the intrinsic parameters and its pose relative to the 3D model. Existing camera pose estimation approaches require known intrinsic parameters and at least three 2D to 3D feature (point or line) correspondences. This cannot always be satisfied in an AVE system. Moreover, due to noise, the estimated camera location may be far from the expectation of the users when the number of correspondences is small. Our approach combines the users' prior knowledge about the camera location and the constraints from the parallel relationship between lines with those from feature correspondences. With at least two feature correspondences, it can always output an estimation of the camera parameters that gives an accurate alignment between the projection of the image (or video) and the 3D model.