An Accurate Calibration Method of a Multi Camera System

In this paper, we proposed a novel method of geometric calibration and synchronization for a multi camera system. Traditional calibration methods of visible cameras can’t be applied to thermal cameras. According to the imaging characteristics of thermal cameras, we designed a new calibration board using materials with different emissivity for calibration. Our calibration board can accurately calibrate RGBD cameras and thermal cameras. In general, thermal cameras have regular non-uniformity corrections, which will result in camera interruption about 1.5 to 2 s and can impact synchronization. In this respect, we adopted the method named nearest adjacent time using timestamp to solve the problem of non-uniformity corrections and synchronization. We evaluated our methods and the experiments showed that our methods had an ideal result for camera calibration and synchronization.

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