Camera Self-Calibration: Theory and Experiments

The problem of finding the internal orientation of a camera (camera calibration) is extremely important for practical applications. In this paper a complete method for calibrating a camera is presented. In contrast with existing methods it does not require a calibration object with a known 3D shape. The new method requires only point matches from image sequences. It is shown, using experiments with noisy data, that it is possible to calibrate a camera just by pointing it at the environment, selecting points of interest and then tracking them in the image as the camera moves. It is not necessary to know the camera motion.