Using pedestrians walking on uneven terrains for camera calibration

A calibrated camera is essential for computer vision systems: the prime reason being that such a camera acts as an angle measuring device. Once the camera is calibrated, applications like three-dimensional reconstruction or metrology or other applications requiring real world information from the video sequences can be envisioned. Motivated by this, we address the problem of calibrating multiple cameras, with an overlapping field of view observing pedestrians in a scene walking on an uneven terrain. This problem of calibration on an uneven terrain has so far not been addressed in the vision community. We automatically estimate vertical and horizontal vanishing points by observing pedestrians in each camera and use the corresponding vanishing points to estimate the infinite homography existing between the different cameras. This homography provides constraints on intrinsic (or interior) camera parameters while also enabling us to estimate the extrinsic (or exterior) camera parameters. We test the proposed method on real as well as synthetic data, in addition to motion capture dataset and compare our results with the state of the art.

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