Precision Evaluation of Three-dimensional Feature Points Measurement by Binocular Vision

Binocular-pair images obtained from two cameras can be used to calculate the three-dimensional (3D) world coordinate of a feature point. However, to apply this method, measurement accuracy of binocular vision depends on some structure factors. This paper presents an experimental study of measurement distance, baseline distance, and baseline direction. Their effects on camera reconstruction accuracy are investigated. The testing set for the binocular model consists of a series of feature points in stereo-pair images and corresponding 3D world coordinates. This paper discusses a method to increase the baseline distance of two cameras for enhancing the accuracy of a binocular vision system. Moreover, there is an inflexion point of the value and distribution of measurement errors when the baseline distance is increased. The accuracy benefit from increasing the baseline distance is not obvious, since the baseline distance exceeds 1000 mm in this experiment. Furthermore, it is observed that the direction errors deduced from the set-up are lower when the main measurement direction is similar to the baseline direction.