Lens Distortion Correction Without Camera Access

Abstract: Lens distortions appear in almost all digital images and cause straight lines to appear curved in the image. This can contribute to errors in position estimations and 3D reconstruction and it is therefore of interest to correct for the distortion. If the camera is available, the distortion parameters can be obtained when calibrating the camera. However, when the camera is unavailable the distortion parameters can not be found with the standard camera calibration technique and other approaches must be used. Recently, variants of Perspective-n-Point (PnP) extended with lens distortionand focal length parameters have been proposed. Given a set of 2D-3D point correspondences, the PnP-based methods can estimate distortion parameters without the camera being available or with modified settings. In this thesis, the performance of PnP-based methods is compared to Zhang’s camera calibration method. The methods are compared both quantitatively, using the errors in reprojectionand distortion parameters, and qualitatively by comparing images before and after lens distortion correction. A test set for the comparison was obtained from a camera and a 3D laser scanner of an indoor scene.The results indicate that one of the PnP-based models can achieve a similar reprojection error as the baseline method for one of the cameras. It could also be seen that two PnP-based models could reduce lens distortion when visually comparing the test images to the baseline. Moreover, it was noted that a model can have a small reprojection error even though the distortion coefficient error is large and the lens distortion is not completely removed. This indicates that it is important to include both quantitative measures, such as reprojection error and distortion coefficient errors, as well as qualitative results when comparing lens distortion correction methods. It could also be seen that PnP-based models with more parameters in the estimation are more sensitive to noise.