Calibrated Zoom for Stereo Vision

Brent Seales
University of Kentucky

2:30pm Friday March 24 in room 2310

Active camera control can improve the quality of the images being used for visual tasks. For example, zooming can improve the resolution of an image feature, allowing for highly-localized stereo matches.

In this talk I will present a new approach to the problem of calibrating a zooming camera for the purpose of stereo vision. This approach is different from other methods in two primary ways. First, we avoid placing a heavy dependence on individual, strongly localized features. Feature localization is obtained iteratively, formulated as part of an error criterion used in various passes of an optimization process. Second, this staged optimization process considers all images simultaneously, representing the parameters of the final calibrated camera as a function of zoom. Experiments on a real image sequence taken by an active, zooming stereo rig demonstrate that with this method one can localize epipolar (stereo) correspondence at any zoom setting to an accuracy of 1 pixel.

At the end of the presentation I will also outline a simple approach to the time-to-contact problem using active zoom control. Our experiments show that using the active zoom gives better accuracy over a longer depth range than fixed-focal-length lenses.