Calibration of stereo cameras with a marked-crossed fringe pattern

Abstract Stereo cameras have been widely used for three-dimensional (3D) imaging, and their performances are highly depended on the calibration accuracy. This paper presents a marked-crossed fringe pattern for the calibration of stereo cameras. Some coded markers are also encoded into the crossed fringe pattern, and the feature points are encoded into the carried phase. Two wrapped phase maps are recovered by using the Fourier transform, and the markers are extracted and decoded for absolute phase unwrapping. Referring to the absolute phase values, the one-to-one mapping between the world points and the image points can be established to calibrate the stereo cameras. Compared with the traditional method, the proposed method adopts global coding, which can flexibly select any part of the feature points for calibration and obtain high-precision camera parameters. Simulations and experiments show the effectiveness of the method.