A new depth measuring method for stereo camera based on converted relative extrinsic parameters

This paper presents a new depth measuring method for the dual-view stereo camera based on the converted relative extrinsic parameters. The relative extrinsic parameters between left and right cameras, which obtained by the stereo camera calibration, can indicate the geometric relationships among the left principle point, right principle point and convergent point. Furthermore, the geometry which consists of the corresponding points and the object can be obtained by making conversion between the corresponding points and principle points. Therefore, the depth of the object can be calculated based on the obtained geometry. The correctness of the proposed method has been proved in 3ds Max, and the validity of the method has been verified on the binocular stereo system of flea2 cameras. We compared our experimental results with the popular RGB-D camera (e.g. Kinect). The comparison results show that our method is reliable and efficient, without epipolar rectification.