Reducing the Variance of Intrinsic Camera Calibration Results in the ROS Camera_Calibration Package

The intrinsic calibration of a camera is the process in which the internal optical and geometric characteristics of the camera are determined. If accurate intrinsic parameters of a camera are known, the ray in 3D space that every point in the image lies on can be determined. Pairing with another camera allows for the position of the points in the image to be calculated by intersection of the rays. Accurate intrinsics also allow for the position and orientation of a camera relative to some world coordinate system to be calculated. These two reasons for having accurate intrinsic calibration for a camera are especially important in the field of industrial robotics where 3D cameras are frequently mounted on the ends of manipulators.

In the ROS (Robot Operating System) ecosystem, the camera_calibration package is the default standard for intrinsic camera calibration. Several researchers from the Industrial Robotics & Automation division at Southwest Research Institute have noted that this package results in large variances in the intrinsic parameters of the camera when calibrating across multiple attempts. There are also open issues on this matter in their public repository that have not been addressed by the developers. In this thesis, we confirm that the camera_calibration package does indeed return different results across multiple attempts, test out several possible hypothesizes as to why, identify the reason, and provide simple solution to fix the cause of the issue.