Camera Calibration

Question

I am using OpenCV, a newbie to the entire thing.

I have a scenario, I am projecting on a wall, I am building a kind of a robot which has a camera. I wanted to know how can I process the image so that I could get the real-world values of the co-ordinates of the blobs tracked by my camera?

Answer 1

First of all, you need to calibrate the intrinsic of the camera. Use checkerboard-patterns printed on cardboard to do this, OpenCV has methods for this although there are finished tools for this as well. To get an idea, I have written some python code to calibrate from a live video stream, move the cardboard along the camera in some different angles and distances. Take a look here: http://svn.ioctl.eu/pub/opencv/py-camera_intrinsic/

Then you need to calibrate the extrinsic of the camera, that is the position of the camera wrt. your world coordinates. You can place some markers on the wall, define the 3D-position of those markers and let OpenCV calibrate the extrinsic for this (cvFindExtrinsicCameraParams2). In my sample code, I calculate the extrinsic wrt. the checkerboard so I can render a Teapot in the correct perspective of the camera. You have to adjust this to your needs.

I assume you project only onto a flat surface. You have to know the geometry to get the 3D coordinates of your detected blob. You can then find the blobs in your camera image and knowing intrinsic, extrinsic and the geometry, you can cast rays for each blob from the camera according to your intrinsic/extrinsic and calculate the intersection of each such ray with your known geometry. The intersection then is your 3D point in world space where the blob is projected to.