2003/08/02 by Lili Ma, Ma, Lili, YangQuan Chen +3
Computer Science · Engineering · #Advanced Vision and Imaging #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #I.4.1 #Image Processing Techniques and Applications #Optical measurement and interference techniques
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.cs/0308003
openalex publication_date 2003/08/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The commonly used radial distortion model for camera calibration is in fact an assumption or a restriction. In practice, camera distortion could happen in a general geometrical manner that is not limited to the radial sense. This paper proposes a simplified geometrical distortion modeling method by using two different radial distortion functions in the two image axes. A family of simplified geometric distortion models is proposed, which are either simple polynomials or the rational functions of polynomials. Analytical geometric undistortion is possible using two of the distortion functions discussed in this paper and their performance can be improved by applying a piecewise fitting idea. Our experimental results show that the geometrical distortion models always perform better than their radial distortion counterparts. Furthermore, the proposed geometric modeling method is more appropriate for cameras whose distortion is not perfectly radially symmetric around the center of distortion.