IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL.
70, 2021
A Convenient and High-Accuracy Multicamera
Calibration Method Based on Imperfect
Spherical Objects
Liming Tao , Renbo Xia , Jibin Zhao , Tao Zhang , Yueling Chen , and Shengpeng Fu
Abstract— Multicamera systems have important applications
in industrial online measurement, attracting wide interest due
to their encouraging performance. However, how to develop a
convenient and high-accuracy multicamera calibration model is
a big challenge. Traditional calibration methods based on 2-D
objects require the preparation of high-precision and large-scale
calibration objects and have poor adaptability to the spatial
distribution of cameras. To address these issues, a convenient
and accurate multicamera calibration method is proposed based
on an imperfect spherical object. Specifically, a special calibration
object, i.e., an imperfect sphere with many coded targets is
designed for calibrating the multicamera system, where the
optical axes of the cameras are different in orientations and
converge into the measurement field. Then, a Euclidean recon-
struction method is employed to calculate the camera poses and
the spatial coordinates of feature points in the local coordinate
system after the adaptive grouping of cameras is completed.
Moreover, a graph theory-based optimal path transformation
algorithm is developed to obtain the camera poses and spatial
point coordinates in the global coordinate system (GCS), and
a spherical projection optimization algorithm is designed to
spheroidize the spatial coordinates of feature points. In the end,
the camera poses and the spatial coordinates of feature points
in the GCS are optimized by a bundle adjustment algorithm.
We build a multicamera system and conduct extensive experi-
ments to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.
Index Terms— 3-D calibration object, bundle adjustment,
machine vision, multicamera calibration.
I. I NTRODUCTION
M ACHINE vision system has played an increasingly
important role in industrial inspection in recent years
because it allows noncontact, real-time, and high-accuracy
measurements [1]–[4]. Monocular vision and binocular vision
Manuscript received July 13, 2021; revised August 17, 2021; accepted
September 6, 2021. Date of publication September 16, 2021; date of current
version September 29, 2021. This work was supported by the National Nature
Science Foundation of China under Grant 52075532, Grant 91948203, and
Grant 51805527. The Associate Editor coordinating the review process was
Anirban Mukherjee. (Corresponding authors: Renbo Xia; Jibin Zhao.)
Liming Tao and Tao Zhang are with the State Key Laboratory of Robotics,
Shenyang Institute of Automation, Institutes for Robotics and Intelligent
Manufacturing, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110016, China, and
also with the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049,
China (e-mail: taoliming@sia.cn; zhangtaosia@gmail.com).
Renbo Xia, Jibin Zhao, Yueling Chen, and Shengpeng Fu are with
the State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation,
Institutes for Robotics and Intelligent Manufacturing, Chinese Academy of
Sciences, Shenyang 110016, China (e-mail: xiarb@sia.cn; jbzhao@sia.cn;
chenyueling@sia.cn; fushengpeng@sia.cn).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIM.2021.3113132
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5016715
systems are the most widely used systems in the industry due
to their simple structure and well-developed theories. However,
their simple structure limits their applications in complex and
large-scale parts inspection [5]–[7]. It is a good choice to
use multicamera systems to solve this problem. For example,
in the literature [8], multiple static and locally overlapping
cameras are used to form a multicamera system to detect
various geometric structures on automobile parts. The mea-
surement accuracy of multicamera systems depends greatly on
the calibration accuracy [9]–[11]. Therefore, how to develop
a high-efficiency and high-accuracy multicamera calibration
method is of great significance for industrial measurement,
especially in the scenarios for complex and large-scale parts
inspection.
Multicamera calibration methods can be divided into two
categories: the methods with physical calibration objects and
the methods with virtual calibration objects. The calibration
methods with physical calibration objects need to prepare a
high-precision calibration object on which many feature points
are evenly distributed. According to the image coordinates and
the known spatial coordinates of the feature points, the exter-
nal parameters of the multicamera system can be obtained
by using space resection methods [12]–[15]. These methods
require the size of the physical calibration object to be large
enough to fully fill the field-of-view (FOV) of each camera in
the multicamera system. Thus, it is difficult to manufacture and
maintain this kind of calibration object, which is not suitable
for on-site applications. To solve this problem, the calibration
methods with virtual calibration objects are developed. The
virtual calibration objects are composed of many virtual spatial
feature points which are mainly generated in two ways: 1) by
regularly moving a dedicated 2-D calibration board in the
measurement field and 2) by moving a 1-D reference bar in
the measurement field. These methods are more suitable for
on-site calibration of the camera’s external parameters, which
can also expand the measurement range of the systems at
the same time [16]–[20]. However, these methods suffer a
serious common problem, i.e., the placement of the calibration
objects or reference bars requires the operator to have certain
background knowledge, and the operation process is rela-
tively cumbersome. In addition, their calibration accuracy for
multicamera systems still needs to be continuously improved
in order to meet the sophisticated industrial measurement
applications.
 5016715
To improve the accuracy and convenience of calibration,
a multicamera calibration method is proposed by moving
an imperfect spherical object (a perfectly spherical object is
also feasible) in the measurement field. To be more specific,
a calibration object is designed by sticking dot-distribution
coded targets on a sphere that does not need to have high
sphericity, which could further avoid the difficulty and cost of
manufacturing the high-precision calibration object. In addi-
tion, it is also beneficial for cameras with different poses to
taking photographs from any perspective by using a spherical
calibration object, which also greatly simplifies the calibra-
tion processes. Then, an optimal path transformation (OPT)
algorithm for estimating camera poses is developed, and a
spherical projection optimization (SPO) algorithm for well
initializing the spatial coordinates of feature points in the
global coordinate system (GCS) is designed in order to achieve
high-accuracy multicamera calibration. Finally, a multicamera
system is designed and extensive experimental results show
that the proposed method can meet the requirement of multi-
camera system calibration.
The main contributions of the proposed method are sum-
marized as follows.
1) A calibration object that is easy to obtain and low
cost are designed. Meanwhile, an OPT algorithm is
developed for estimating the camera poses in the GCS,
and an SPO algorithm for well initializing the spatial
coordinates of feature points in the GCS is designed to
achieve high-accuracy multicamera calibration.
2) A calibration method for a multicamera system with
randomly distributed cameras is realized, which is very
beneficial for ensuring the visibility and detection accu-
racy of feature points. No matter how the axis of the
camera points to the measurement field, there is always
a part of the feature points on the sphere that can be
captured from an almost orthographic angle.
3) A multicamera system is built and calibrated with the
proposed calibration method, and extensive experiments
conducted on this system demonstrate the high-precision
parameter calibration results and convenient calibration
process of our proposed method.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows.
In Section II the related work is introduced, and in Section III
the proposed method is discussed in detail. In Section IV,
we present the experiments to verify the superior performance
of the proposed method. Finally, we draw a conclusion in
Section V.
II. R ELATED W ORK
A. Calibration Methods With Physical Calibration Objects
The physical calibration objects include the 2-D calibration
objects and the 3-D calibration objects. The 2-D calibration
objects, such as checkerboard, have been widely used in the
field of computer vision due to their easy manufacturing
and convenient operation [21]–[24]. The camera calibration
method based on a 2-D calibration object is pioneered by
Zhang [12] and is originally mainly used to obtain the internal
parameters of the camera. Although this method is very
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 70, 2021
practical and produces good results when calibrating a single
camera, it is unreasonable to simply repeat the calibration pro-
cedure for each camera in the multicamera system. The pose
between the calibration object and the camera can be obtained
as a by-product of the calibration of the camera’s internal
parameters. Based on this information, the rigid transformation
between any pair of cameras can be determined by the plane
of the arbitrarily selected calibration model. In theory, these
transformations should be constant, regardless of the plane
on which they are calculated. However, this constraint is not
necessarily satisfied in the presence of noise because each
camera is independently calibrated. This inconsistency will
reduce the estimation accuracy of the relative poses between
the cameras, which may cause a serious measurement error in
the multicamera system. Using the known metric structure and
consistency constraints, Sturm and Triggs [25] and Sturm [26]
propose a general method for the relative pose estimation
between cameras and model planes based on factorization.
But this method requires all cameras to be calibrated in
advance. Ueshiba and Tomita [27] propose an algorithm for
simultaneous estimation of relative rigid displacement between
cameras and the internal parameters based on the Zhang’s and
Sturm’s algorithms. This algorithm inherits the convenience
and flexibility of the original method and yields a better
result than the preceding algorithm. But it also encounters the
problem of simultaneous visibility. Another visibility issue is
that the features are imaged obliquely if the angle θ between
the normal of the 2-D calibration object and the optical axis
of the camera is large, which leads to severe feature extraction
errors and calibration errors. Zhao et al. [28] design a special
2-D calibration object by replacing the corner features with
spherical features to improve the accuracy of feature extraction
during oblique imaging, but the promotion of this calibration
object is unfavorable due to the difficulty of preparation.
In addition, when θ is greater than 90◦ , the camera cannot
capture the features due to the occlusion of the calibration
object itself. Feng et al. [29], [30] propose a new calibration
object by replacing conventional materials with transparent
glass. However, in addition to the trouble of oblique imaging,
this method also introduces errors caused by refraction.
In order to overcome the limitations of imaging 2-D calibra-
tion objects, 3-D calibration objects with different shapes have
been used to calibrate multiple cameras. Huang et al. [15]
propose a multicamera method based on a cube calibration
object, each side of which is like a 2-D checkerboard calibra-
tion object. The features on each side of the cube are measured
in advance and unified to the GCS. Therefore, the pose
transformation matrix between the cameras can be calculated
by taking one image with each camera. But we only give
the calibration results of two cameras in the experiment and
claim that the error transfer should be considered if the method
is extended to calibrate multiple cameras. Zhang et al. [14]
design a 3-D calibration object with five planes, and each
plane contains many circular markers. This method can realize
simultaneous calibration of intrinsic and extrinsic parameters
of multiple cameras but requires all cameras to see part of the
calibration object at the same time. Therefore, it is not suitable
for calibrating systems where some cameras do not have a
 TAO et al.: CONVENIENT AND HIGH-ACCURACY MULTICAMERA CALIBRATION METHOD
sufficiently large public FOV. In order to calibrate the circular
camera array, Abedi et al. [13] design a pyramid-shaped
3-D calibration object with a triangular pattern. The pyramid
peak is visible to all cameras and is considered an important
constraint for calibration. However, the accurate extraction of
the towering peak in the image is not an easy task. In addition,
this method is not suitable for calibrating multicamera systems
in the spherical arrangement. In a word, the traditional 3-D
calibration object is usually used in a specific multicamera
system, and all the feature positions need to be accurately
measured in advance. Therefore, its versatility is poor and the
cost is high.
B. Calibration Methods With Virtual Calibration Objects
The method based on the virtual calibration object is ini-
tially applied to off-line photogrammetry [31], [32]. Due to
the convenience of the method and the structural similarity
between the multicamera system (also known as the online
photogrammetric system) and the offline photogrammetric
system, the method is also applied to the multicamera systems.
For offline photogrammetry, the images of the measured
object are asynchronously collected by a camera at different
positions, which requires that we should calibrate the intrinsic
parameters of the camera and the extrinsic parameters at each
position. However, for online photogrammetry, the images of
the measured object are simultaneously collected by multiple
cameras at different positions, which requires that we should
calibrate the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of each camera.
In other words, the online photogrammetry system needs to
calibrate more parameters in order to achieve the purpose of
measurement. In addition, the position, posture, and a number
of cameras cannot be freely arranged, which cannot guarantee
that the virtual calibration object has a good distribution and
acquisition angle in the images. Therefore, the calibration
of a multicamera system is more challenging than offline
photogrammetry.
In the latest research based on virtual calibration objects,
the calibration model of offline photogrammetry has been
widely adopted. Svoboda et al. [19] use the virtual calibration
object generated by the laser pointer to efficiently calibrate
the multicamera system. However, this method requires an
environment with high contrast with the laser point and is
easily affected by the reflective plane in the camera room.
Yu et al. [17] realize the calibration of the multicamera system
based on the virtual calibration object formed by moving an
optical reference bar with three marks in the measurement
volume. However, this method is inefficient, since it requires a
lot of manual participation. Sun et al. [20] use a similar method
to achieve the calibration of a multicamera system based on
the virtual calibration object formed by moving a rigid optical
reference bar with two marks in the measurement volume.
Truong et al. [18] and Aslan et al. [33] achieve multicamera
calibration by extracting the features of the human body
moving in the measurement volume. However, these methods
have large calibration errors and cannot be used for calibration
in industrial measurement. The proposed method in this article
can be classified as a method based on virtual feature points;
but unlike previous methods, we design an imperfect spherical
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5016715
Fig. 1. Schematic of calibrating a multicamera system with cameras randomly
distributed in space by our proposed method.
object and develop a new theoretical model for multicamera
calibration. In the future, we would introduce multiple sensing
modalities, such as tactile sensing, to further improve the
performance of the model [34]–[36].
III. P ROPOSED M ETHOD
A. Problem Statement
Without loss of generality, the schematic of multicamera
calibration is shown in Fig. 1. Let Ow X w Yw Z w denotes the
GCS with the coordinate origin Ow located on the ground
plane or at the optical center of the reference camera. The pro-
posed calibration object with Ni features, whose coordinates
are represented as a set {X i(t) |i = 1, 2, . . . , Ni }, is moved Nt
times, where the positions are represented as set {P S (t) |t =
1, 2, . . . , Nt }, in the measurement volume. The images of the
calibration object are captured by N j cameras denoted as
{C j | j = 1, 2, . . . , N j }. The subscript i and j denote the index
of the feature and the camera, respectively. The superscript t
denotes the index of the position of the calibration object. Each
camera has a coordinate system O j X j Y j Z j , called camera
coordinate system, with the coordinate origin O j located at the
optical center of this camera. x i,(t)j denotes the projection pixel
point of the feature X i(t) on the image plane of the j th camera.
When the positions of the feature X i(t) are fixed, the factors
that affect the position of the projection point x i,(t)j , including
extrinsic parameters and intrinsic parameters. For convenience,
let X and X denote the vector and homogeneous vector of
feature point X, respectively.
The mapping from a spatial point X i(t) to a 2-D pixel point
(t)
x i, j can be expressed as
 
xi,(t)j = G r j , t j , ℘1 j , ℘2 j , Xi(t) (1)
where r j and t j are the rotation and translation transfor-
mation matrices of the j th camera, respectively. ℘1 j =
{ f u j , fv j , u 0 j , v 0 j } is called the intrinsic parameters which
 5016715 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 70, 2021

Fig. 2. Flowchart of the proposed method. First, a decoding and feature matching algorithm is employed to obtain the homologous feature points after the
adaptive grouping of cameras is completed. Then, the Euclidean reconstruction method is conducted to calculate the camera poses and spatial coordinates of
feature points in the local coordinate system. Moreover, the SPO algorithm and the OPT algorithm are adopted for well initializing the camera poses and the
spatial coordinates of feature points in the GCS. Finally, the bundle adjustment algorithm is employed to obtain high-accuracy camera parameters.

describes the mapping from the spatial point X i(t) to the
point x i,(t)j on the image plane of the j th camera. ℘2 j =
{k1 j , k2 j , k3 j , s1 j , s2 j } is the distortion coefficient of the j th
camera. The goal of this article is to obtain the optimal internal
and external parameters of all cameras by minimizing the
following objective function:

Nt   
N j Ni
 
 2

arg min λxi,(t)j − G r j , t j , ℘1 j , ℘2 j , Xi(t) 

t=1 j =1 i=1
 1) Calibration Object Design: A calibration object is
where  = {r j , t j , ℘1 j , ℘2 j , Xi(t) }, and xi,(t)j is the actual
projection of the spatial point X i(t) . λ is a binary variable.
When X i(t) is visible to a camera, λ takes 1, otherwise,
takes 0. Nt represents the total number of positions, where
the spherical calibration object is placed. N j represents the
total number of cameras, making up the measurement system.
Ni represents the total number of all feature points on the
spherical calibration object.
It is worth noticing that there are some common necessary
assumptions needed to be claimed in this article.
Assumption 1: All camera intrinsic parameters remain stable
in the calibration process.
Assumption 2: Each camera has a common FOV with at
least another two cameras.
Assumption 3: The manufacturing position error of the
points on coded targets is less than ±0.1 mm.
B. Methodology
The entire flow of our proposed method is shown in Fig. 2.
Different from the existing calibration algorithms, we develop
the OPT algorithm and SPO algorithm, which reduce the
(2) possibility of global nonlinear optimization getting stuck in
a local minimum and improve the calibration accuracy.
designed by pasting the dot-distribution coded targets onto
the sphere, as given in Fig. 3. More specifically, the diameter
of the sphere is about 500 mm, and there are approximately
200 coded targets on its surface, each of which has a size of
28 mm × 28 mm. Each dot-distribution coded target contains
eight subtargets, which can further provide eight features,
namely, {A, B, C, D, E, M1, M2, M3}. A, B, C, D, and
E are template points, and M1, M2, and M3 are coding
points. The diameter of each feature point is about 3 mm.
The reasons why we design the spherical calibration object
are as follows: 1) spherical objects are easy to obtain, and
the globe for teaching is sufficient to meet the requirements;
2) it is helpful to improve the detection accuracy of feature
points because some feature points on the sphere are always

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 TAO et al.: CONVENIENT AND HIGH-ACCURACY MULTICAMERA CALIBRATION METHOD 5016715

where F j,g and e j,g are the fundamental matrix and epipole
between the two cameras, respectively. Without loss of gen-
erality, assuming that the projective depth of X i in the j th
camera is 1, the projection depth of the point under the
other two cameras can be obtained according to (4). Then,
the projection equations of n features in the common FOV of
three cameras can be formulated as
⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤
μ1,1 x1,1 · · · μn,1 xn,1 Qp1  
Fig. 3. Designed calibration object and its related components. (a) Four dif- ⎣ μ1,2 x12 · · · μn,2 xn,2 ⎦ = ⎣ Qp2 ⎦ Xp1 · · · Xpn . (5)
ferent dot-distribution coded targets. (b) Sphere without special requirements μ1,3 x1,3 · · · μn,3 xn,3 Qp3
for sphericity. (c) Designed calibration object.
Using the SVD-based method [16], [23] to factorize the
matrix on the left side of (5), whose rank does not exceed 4
orthophotographed; and 3) it can adapt to various arrangements at most, the 3-D coordinates [ Xp1 · · · Xpn ] and camera poses
of cameras. [ Qp1 Qp2 Qp3 ]T in the projective space can be recovered.
2) Estimation of the Camera Poses and the Spatial Coor- In order to further obtain the corresponding 3-D coordinates
dinates of the Feature Points in Local Coordinate System: and camera poses in the Euclidean space, the transformation
Notice that we do not focus on feature matching, since the matrix H from projective space to Euclidean space is intro-
use of coded targets makes it very easy and reliable. More duced, which should satisfy the following constraints:
details of feature matching are given in the literature [37]. ⎧  
Once all cameras are installed on the rigid framework, their ⎪
⎪ Q H = α K r t
⎪
⎪ 1 1 1 1 1
internal and external parameters are considered unchanged ⎨  
during the calibration process. Therefore, the feature points Q2 H = α2 K2 r2 t2 (6)
⎪
⎪  
in two photographs taken by the same camera at different ⎪
⎪
⎩Q3 H = α3 K3 r3 t3
positions of the calibration object can be merged into the same
image plane. In other words, this approach is equivalent to where αi (i = 1, 2, 3) is a nonzero real number. Solving (5)
achieving the same effect as the use of a large-scale calibration and (6) together, H can be solved. QH and H−1 X correspond
object if the distance between the coded targets does not need to the pose of the camera and the coordinate of feature point in
to be known during the calibration process. Thus, we no longer the Euclidean space, respectively. Therefore, the transforma-
specifically declare the position of the calibrated object where tion relationship from projective reconstruction to Euclidean
the spatial feature points are located. We use the symbol X i reconstruction can be expressed as follows:
to replace X i(t) and x i, j to replace x i,(t)j in the following text. ⎧   T
In a multicamera system, not all cameras have a common ⎪
⎨ Q1 Q2 Q3 = Qp1 Qp2 Qp3 H,
FOV. Therefore, the cameras must be automatically grouped     (7)
⎪
⎩ X1 · · · Xn = H−1 Xp1 · · · Xpn .
according to the number of common feature points in the
FOV. Each group contains k cameras, and each camera can
Let Qg and Q j denote the pose matrices of the gth and j th
participate in multiple groups. In this article, k takes the
cameras in the local coordinate system, respectively. Then,
value 3. The cameras in each group are calibrated in order to
the relative pose transformation between the gth and j th
obtain the poses of the cameras in the local coordinate system,
cameras can be expressed as
which will be converted to the GCS. More specifically, we first
group any three cameras to get all possible combinations. Q j,g = Qg · Q−1
j . (8)
Then, we calculate the number of common features in each
group of cameras, and those groups whose number of common Accordingly, the coordinates of the i th point in j th camera
features is lower than the threshold THpt are discarded. Here, coordinate system can be obtained as follows:
we take one group as an example to introduce the calculation Xi, j = Q−1
j · Xi . (9)
method of camera pose and spatial point coordinates.
According to the mathematical model of pinhole camera 3) Initialization of the Camera Poses and the Spatial Coor-
perspective imaging, the mapping relationship between a spa- dinates of the Feature Points in the GCS: We choose the
tial point X i and an image point x i, j can be expressed as camera, which is shared by most groups as a reference camera,
  and define the coordinate system of the reference camera as
μi, j xi, j = K j r j t j Xi (3) the GCS. After the camera poses and the spatial coordinates
where K j ( j = 1, 2, 3) is the intrinsic matrix of j th camera, of the feature points in the local coordinate system of each
and μi, j is the unknown scale factor which represents the group are obtained, the next step is to transform the local
projective depth from the spatial point X i to the j th camera. coordinate systems into the GCS to perform the multicamera
The relationship between the scale factors of point X i in the global calibration. However, there are many possible trans-
j th camera and gth camera can be defined as formation paths. And different paths will lead to different
 T global calibration accuracy. Thus, it is necessary to develop an
e j,g × xi, j F j,g · xi,g OPT algorithm to improve the estimation accuracy of camera
μi, j = μi,g (4)
e j,g × xi, j 2 poses and the spatial coordinates of the feature points in

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 5016715 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 70, 2021

the GCS. In addition, an SPO algorithm is developed to better

initialize the spatial coordinates of the feature points in the
GCS based on a spheroidization operation. More details of the
OPT algorithm and the SPO algorithm are given as follows.
Optimal Path Transformation Algorithm: Graph theory is
used to clearly describe the transformation path optimization
problem. In this article, the camera is defined as the vertex of
the graph, and the pose transformation matrix between the
cameras is defined as the edge. The weight of each edge
depends on the reprojection error and the number of com-
mon features between cameras. In general, the weight of the
edge represents the distance between two vertices. However,
the purpose of this article is to achieve the highest accuracy Fig. 4. Two-dimensional adjacency matrix. The node Si, j stores all useful
camera pose in GCS. Therefore, the weight of the edge should information between Ci and C j , including transformation matrix, spatial
points, and edge weight.
reflect the pose accuracy between the two cameras. Inspired by
the A star search algorithm [38], a calculation algorithm for
the OPT is developed based on the graph. A heuristic function After obtaining the weights of the edges of the graph
is designed to improve the efficiency of finding the optimal through (13), the next step is to design an algorithm to find the
path by predicting the shortest path from the current vertex to optimal transformation path. To describe the algorithm clearly,
the target vertex. we let S j,g = {Q j,g ,  j,g , a j,g } represents the information of
The first step of the algorithm is to determine the weight each edge in the graph, where  j,g = {Xi, j |i = 1, 2, . . . , N j,g }
{a j,g | j = 1, 2, . . . , N j , g = 1, 2, . . . , N j } of each edge of the is the set of feature points in the common FOV of the j th
graph. The reprojection error is used to evaluate the recon- camera and the gth camera that is calculated by (7)–(9). It is
struction accuracy of the vision system, which also numeri- easy to see that Q j,g = Q−1 g, j and a j,g = ag, j according
cally reflects the correctness of the camera pose. The mean of to the properties of the transformation matrix and (11)–(13).
the reprojection error of the j th camera is defined as In addition, we define a 2-D adjacency matrix M = {S j,g | j =
1, 2, . . . , N j , g = 1, 2, . . . , N j }, as shown in Fig. 4, to facili-
1   
n
E Rj =  x  − G r j , t j , ℘ 1 j , ℘ 2 j , Xi  (10) tate the OTP algorithm to find the optimal transformation path.
i, j
n i=1 We first apply the method described in Section III-B.2 to
where n denotes the number of feature points that success- complete the calculation of the camera pose and spatial point
fully reconstructed with a group of cameras. Then, the first coordinates in the local coordinate system. Then, the relevant
component of weight in the edge can be defined as elements in the adjacency matrix are filled. If an element in
⎧ ⎧ the adjacency matrix is recalculated by another group cameras,
⎪
⎪ ⎪
⎨ E R j ∈ (0, T Her ]& the one with a smaller edge weight is selected as this element.
⎪
⎨ E R j + E Rg , if E R ∈ (0, T H ]& Here, we regard the adjacency matrix as a map and the
a (1) ⎪ j er
j,g = 2 ⎩ (11)
⎪
⎪ C , C ∈ Same Group. elements in the adjacency matrix as map nodes. We define
⎪
⎩
j g
the camera to be transformed as the starting node on the
+∞, otherwise
map and the reference camera as the target node. The OPT
where E R j and E Rg denote the mean of the reprojection algorithm not only considers the edge weight a j,g but also
error of the j th and gth camera, respectively. THer is the considers the number of nodes that pass through during the
reprojection error threshold. pose transformation. Thus, the estimated shortest path length
As a rule of thumb, the larger the number of common f ( p) from the starting node to the target node through pth
feature points in the FOV of two cameras, the more accurate node is defined as
the camera pose estimation can be obtained. Therefore, we use
the reciprocal of the number of common feature points to f ( p) = bm g( p) + h( p) (14)
establish the second component of the weight of the edge, where p denotes the next node on the map to be searched. m
which can be expressed as denotes the number of nodes passed from the starting node to
1 the pth node during the pose transformation. b is a constant,
a (2)
j,g = (12) and b ≥1. b =1 means that the influence of the number
N j,g
of transformations is not considered. g( p) denotes the actual
where N j,g denotes the number of common feature points of length of the path from starting node to pth node. h( p) is
the j th and gth cameras. a heuristic function that denotes the estimated shortest path
Using (11) and (12) jointly, the weight of edges in the graph from the pth node to the target node. Assuming that Nmin is
can be defined as the minimum number of nodes passed from the pth node to
a j,g = ξ1 a (1) (2)
j,g + ξ2 a j,g (13) the target node, then h( p) can be defined as
h( p) = Nmin × amin (15)
where ξ1 and ξ2 represent the coefficients of a (1) (2)
j,g and a j,g ,
respectively. where amin = min{a j,g | j = 1, 2, . . . , N j , g = 1, 2, . . . , N j }.

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 TAO et al.: CONVENIENT AND HIGH-ACCURACY MULTICAMERA CALIBRATION METHOD
Fig. 5. Example of finding the optimal transformation path in a four-camera system. (a) All feasible transformation paths. The blue arrow indicates the
optional path, and the red arrow indicates the optimal path. (b) Process of finding the optimal transformation path. The part marked in red represents the
minimum value of the current search node. The equations in the box filled with light cyan represent the calculation process of the next nodes to be searched.
In order to find the optimal transformation path, we first
calculate the f ( p) of each node according to (14) and regard
the node with the smallest f ( p) as the current node. Then,
calculate the f ( p) of the next node (ignoring the nodes that the
current path has passed), and regard the node with the smallest
f ( p) as the current node again. By analogy, the search ends
until the target node becomes the current node. An example
of finding the optimal transformation path in a four-camera
system is shown in Fig. 5, where b = 1.1.
Suppose the transformation path of one camera
obtained by the above-mentioned method is Path =
{Ss,s , Ss,1 , S1,2 , . . . , Sn,r , Sr,r }, where Ss,s and Sr,r are the
starting node and target node, respectively. Then, the pose of
the camera in the GCS can be expressed as
Qs,r = Qs,1 Q1,2 , . . . , Qn,r . (16)
Similarly, the corresponding spatial points in the GCS can
be expressed as
−1 −1
Xi,r = Q−1
n,r , . . . , Q1,2 Qs,1 Xi,s . (17)
We summarized the proposed OPT algorithm in
Algorithm 1.
The OPT algorithm is a new proposed algorithm considering
the factors which affect the camera calibration accuracy. It is
suitable for multicamera calibration where local calibration
is performed first and then a global calibration. Dijkstra’s
algorithm is the most similar to the proposed algorithm,
which is another approach that could be used. But Dijkstra’s
algorithm has the problem of lower search efficiency. Our
algorithm only calculates the length of a part of paths, which
has the time complexity of O(n log(n)), and n is the number
of nodes. While Dijkstra’s algorithm needs to calculate the
length of all paths, which has the time complexity of O(n 2 ),
n is the number of nodes [39].
Spherical Projection Optimization Algorithm: We have
mentioned that the initial value has a great influence on the
BA optimization. And we have obtained a good initial value
of the camera pose through the OPT algorithm. Next, we will
develop an SPO algorithm to obtain a better initial value of
the spatial point coordinates. Because the spatial points used
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5016715
Algorithm 1 OPT Algorithm
Input:
Ki : intrinsic matrices;
xi, j : image point coordinates;
T H pt , T H er , ξ1 , ξ2 , b: thresholds and coefficients.
Output:
Camera poses and spatial point positions in the GCS.
1: Initialize the adjacency matrix M with S j,g =
{i denti t y matri x, empt y set, i n f i ni t y};
2: Group any three cameras to get all possible combinations
CombSet = {Cm Setυ |υ = 1, 2, · · · , Ncs };
3: for υ ← 1 to Ncs do
4: Match the features and count the number of features
successfully matched N j,g ;
5: Calculate the relative poses Q j,g and spatial points P j,g
of Cm Setυ by Eq. (3) to (9);
6: Calculate the edge weight a j,g based on xi, j , K j , N j,g
by Eq. (10) to (13);
7: if a j,g < the corresponding element in M then
8: Replace corresponding element in M with Q j,g , P j,g ,
a j,g ;
9: end if
10: end for
11: Find the minimum value of a j,g in M;
12: Calculate Nmin by the A star search algorithm [38];
13: for j ← 1 to N j do
14: Calculate the optimal path Path j based on M by
Eq. (14) to (15);
15: Calculate camera poses and point positions in the GCS
by Eq. (16) to (17);
16: end for
by this algorithm are composed of feature points on multiple
spherical calibration objects which actually correspond to the
same spherical calibration object placed in different positions.
Therefore, in order to implement the algorithm, the spatial
points need to be divided into multiple subsets according to the
sphere to which they belong. Next, sphere fitting is performed
on the spatial points in each subset to obtain the parameters of
 5016715
Algorithm 2 SPO Algorithm
Input:
Xi,r : The spatial points obtained by algorithm 1.
Output:
Optimized spatial points.
1: Divide Xi,r into Nt groups {SpSett |t = 1, 2, · · · , Nt },
(t) (t)
where SpSett = {Xi,r |i = 1, 2, . . . , Ni,r };
2: for t ← 1 to Nt do
3: Fit the sphere with SpSett to get the sphere parameters;
(t)
4: for i ← 1 to Ni,r do
5: Calculate the projection point of the spatial point on
the sphere;
6: Save the projection point.
7: end for
8: end for
the sphere. Then, all the points are projected to the spherical
surface along the radius direction. The obtained projection
points are considered as candidates for better initial values of
spatial points. We summarized the proposed SPO algorithm in
Algorithm 2.
4) Global Optimization and Scale Transformation:
Although we have obtained the camera poses and point
positions by the proposed OPT algorithm and SPO algo-
rithm, the obtained values do not meet the requirement of
high-precision industrial measurement. In order to obtain more
accurate camera poses and point positions, we employ the
bundle adjustment algorithm to optimize the reprojection error,
which can further refine these parameters. More specifically,
given the spatial point coordinates in the GCS and the initial
poses of the cameras, we refine the parameters by optimizing
the reprojection error defined via (2).
According to the calibration theory, the camera poses and
the spatial point positions obtained by global optimization are
different from the actual value by a scale. Normally, this scale
can be obtained by calculating the ratio of the reconstructed
length of the reference bar and its theoretical length.
According to Assumption 3, the distance between the
template points of the dot-distribution coded targets on the
calibration object is a fixed value, which also obeys the normal
distribution. Therefore, we can use the two most distant points,
i.e., point A and point E, as shown in Fig. 3(a), to calculate
the scale factor, which can be expressed as
NAE 
 
1  (A) (E) 
scale = Xi,r − Xi,r 
d · NAE i=1
where Xi,r (A) and Xi,r (E) denote the reconstruction coordinates
of point A and point E on the i th dot-distribution coded
target, respectively. d denotes the actual distance between
point A and point E. After obtaining the scale, we can calculate
the spatial points and the camera poses in the GCS by the
following equation:
 feature points in the captured images.
T j = scale · T j,r
(19)
Xi = scale · Xi,r
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 70, 2021
where T j,r and Xi,r denote the camera translation vectors and
spatial points before scale transformation, respectively. T j and
Xi denote the camera translation vectors and spatial points
after scale transformation, respectively. It is worth noticing that
if the position accuracy of the features of the dot-distribution
coded targets is not high enough, the global scale can still
be obtained by using the reference bar reconstruction method,
as described in Fig. 2.
IV. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
A. Experiment Settings
To verify the performance of the proposed method, we build
a multicamera measurement system with ten cameras mounted
on a rigid frame, as shown in Fig. 6(a). The measurement
system is a rectangular parallelepiped structure with a size
of 1500 mm × 1000 mm × 1200 mm, which consists of ten
AVT G-319B cameras distributed in two rows on the top plane.
To improve the lighting conditions of the system, ten ring light
sources are coaxially distributed with the camera. In addition,
as shown in Fig. 6(b), a clearer photograph of the actual globe
is provided, which enlarges a part of the globe to show the
stretch of the dot-distribution coded targets more clearly.
Four experiments, including the calibration object layout
experiments, the OPT algorithm experiments, the SPO algo-
rithm experiments, and the comparative experiments, are con-
ducted to prove the effectiveness of our proposed method.
The reprojection error E rpj is employed to evaluate the model
performance, which is defined as follows:
1  
N j Ni,r
2
E rpj = x − x i, j (20)
Nall j =1 i=1 i, j
where x i, j and x i, j denote the reprojected and captured image
point, respectively. Nall is the cardinal of these sets.
As shown in Fig. 6(c), two reference bars (i.e., Aref and
Bref ) are used for reconstruction accuracy experiments in this
article. The reference bar Aref has four markers, which are
denoted as A1, A2, A3, and A4. The reference bar Bref
also has four markers, which are denoted as B1, B2, B3,
and B4. Five subreference bars, i.e., A1A2, A3A4, B1B2,
B1B3, and B1B4 are used in this article. The reference
length of each subbar, which is denoted as L, is obtained
using a high-accuracy three-coordinate imager and is given
in Fig. 6(c). We employ the proposed multicamera system to
reconstruct the reference bars and denote the reconstruction
length as L rcs . Then, the reconstruction error E rcs can be
(18) defined as
E rcs = L − L rcs . (21)
B. Calibration Object Layout Experiments
The layout (i.e., the number of placement times and place-
ment position) of calibration objects has a great influence
on the calibration result because it determines the number of
A heuristic method is employed to find the best layout. More
specifically, as shown in Fig. 7, seven different layouts are
 TAO et al.: CONVENIENT AND HIGH-ACCURACY MULTICAMERA CALIBRATION METHOD
Fig. 6. Equipment used in the experiment. (a) Diagram of the multicamera
system with ten cameras. (b) Much clearer photograph of the calibration
object. (c) Reference bar and its geometric information.
Fig. 7. Schematic of seven different layouts of the calibration objects.
employed, where calibration objects are placed as evenly as
possible.
Two evaluation metrics, i.e., the reprojection error and the
reference bar reconstruction error are used to evaluate the cal-
ibration performance. As shown in Fig. 8(a), the reprojection
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5016715
Fig. 8. Results of calibration object layout experiments. (a) Reprojection
errors of the feature points under different layouts. (b) Reconstruction errors
of subreference bars under different layouts.
TABLE I
T HRESHOLD AND C OEFFICIENT VALUES U SED IN THE A LGORITHMS
error increases slightly and then gradually becomes stable
with the increasing of the number of placement times. The
maximum reprojection error is less than 0.2. These experi-
mental results show that the proposed model is convergent.
In addition, as shown in Fig. 8(b), when the number of
placement times is small, the reference bar reconstruction error
is relatively large. With the increasing of the number of place-
ment times, the reconstruction error gradually decreases and
tends to be stable at the error of 0.1 mm. These experimental
phenomena show that increasing the number of placement
times appropriately can effectively improve the calibration
performance. However, when the number of placement times
exceeds 4, its effect on the reconstruction error is limited.
Increasing the number of placement times would also increase
the complexity of the calibration process. Thus, we set the
number of placement times to be 4 in this article in order to
balance calibration accuracy and complexity.
C. OPT Algorithm Experiments
To prove the effectiveness of the proposed OPT algorithm,
we conduct two calibration experiments. The first experi-
ment employs the proposed OPT algorithm in the calibration
process. The second experiment does not employ the OPT
algorithm, which is called the none-OPT algorithm, as shown
in Algorithm 3. There are several thresholds and coefficients
that should be set appropriately for the algorithms, which are
given in Table I.
As shown in Fig. 9, the fifth camera is set as the refer-
ence camera on which the GCS is established. The number
on each line denotes the weight of each edge, which is
calculated by (13). After getting the weight, the optimal
transformation path can be obtained via (14). For instance,
as shown in Fig. 9(a), according to (14), the optimal path from
“camera2” to the reference camera “camera5” is {C2 , C1 , C5 }.
Similarly, the shortest path for “camera10” to “camera5” is
{C10 , C8 , C5 }. As a contrast, as shown in Fig. 9(b), we directly
employ the path from the adjacency matrix. More specifically,
 5016715 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 70, 2021

Algorithm 3 None-OPT Algorithm

Input:
Ki : intrinsic matrices;
xi, j : image point coordinates;
T H pt : threshold.
Output:
Camera poses and spatial point positions in the GCS.
1: Group any three cameras that contains reference camera,
CombSet = {Cm Setυ |υ = 1, 2, · · · , Ncs };
2: for υ ← 1 to Ncs do
Fig. 10. Experimental results of the OPT algorithm experiments. (a) Repro-
3: if There are unoriented cameras in the Cm Setυ then
jection error of the features on the images captured by the ten cameras.
4: Match the features and count the number of features (b) Reconstruction error of five subreference bars.
successfully matched, N j,g ;
5: Calculate the poses Q j,r and 3D points P j,r of the
Cm Setυ by Eq. (3) to (9);
6: end if
7: end for
8: while There are unoriented cameras do
9: Find oriented cameras, {Cso |so = 1, 2, · · · , Nso };
10: for so ← 1 to Nso do
11: Set Cso as reference camera, and repeat Step 1 to 7;
12: Calculate camera poses and point positions in the GCS
by Eq. (16) to (17);
13: end for
14: end while

Fig. 9. Transformation path of cameras. The black solid dots represent the
camera, and the solid lines and the dotted lines represent the used and unused
transformation paths, respectively. (a) Path obtained by the proposed OPT
algorithm. (b) Path obtained by the none OPT algorithm.
taking the path of “camera2” to “camera5” for example,
the path length is 0.1221 which is obtained by the proposed
OPT algorithm, and the path length obtained by the none-OPT
algorithm is 0.188. This experiment shows the proposed OPT
algorithm can actually help obtain the shortest transformation
path.
In order to further prove the effectiveness of the proposed
OPT algorithm, we also use the reprojection error and subref-
erence bar reconstruction error to evaluate the performance.
As shown in Fig. 10(a), the average value of the reprojec-
tion error obtained by the proposed OPT algorithm is about
0.09 pixels, which is much smaller than that obtained by the
none-OPT algorithm (0.15 pixels). As shown in Fig. 10(b),
the average value of the reconstruction error of the subrefer-
ence bar obtained by the proposed OPT algorithm is about
Fig. 11. Schematic of the effect of the SPO algorithm. (a) Spatial points
before performing the SPO algorithm and a curved surface fit with them.
(b) Spatial points after performing the SPO algorithm and a curved surface
fit with them. The different colors indicate different z-axis coordinate values.
All spatial points are obtained from real experiments.
0.11 mm, which is also much smaller than that obtained by
the none-OPT algorithm.
D. SPO Algorithm Experiments
As shown in Fig. 11(a), we visualize some of the spatial
points before performing the SPO algorithm and fit a curved
surface with them to better illustrate the distribution of spatial
points. Obviously, the spatial points are not on the same
sphere. Therefore, we fit the spherical surface and project
the spatial points to the spherical surface along the radius
direction. The result is shown in Fig. 11(b). Theoretically,
it is reasonable to regard the obtained projection points as
candidates for better initial values of spatial points.
Furthermore, we conduct two experiments to prove the
effectiveness of the proposed SPO algorithm. The first experi-
ment employs the SPO algorithm. The second experiment does
not employ the SPO algorithm, i.e., the spatial points obtained

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 TAO et al.: CONVENIENT AND HIGH-ACCURACY MULTICAMERA CALIBRATION METHOD 5016715

TABLE II
R EPROJECTION E RROR OF THE SPO A LGORITHM AND THE N ONE -SPO A LGORITHM

by Algorithm 1 or Algorithm 3 are directly used as the initial

value of BA optimization, called the none-SPO algorithm.
The inaccurate intrinsic parameters and feature extraction
have the most serious impact on the spatial point. Therefore,
to prove the superiority of the SPO method more objectively,
we add different degrees of Gaussian noise (10%–25%) to
the spatial point to simulate the spatial point error caused by
the inaccurate intrinsic parameters and the inaccurate feature Fig. 12. Locations of the used cameras and the layouts of the calibration
extraction. The process of using the noise is as follows. object.

1) Generate Gaussian random numbers, Rx,i , R y,i , and

Rz,i , between −1 and 1.
2) Add a%(a = 10, 15, 20, 25) Gaussian noise to the
spatial point coordinates
⎧
⎪
⎨ X i,R = X i,r + a% × R × Rx,i
Yi,R = Yi,r + a% × R × R y,i (22)
⎪
⎩
Z i,R = Z i,r + a% × R × Rz,i
where R is a constant, and R = 250 mm, which
is approximately equal to the radius of the calibration
object; X i,R , Yi,R , and Z i,R are spatial point coordinate
components with Gaussian noise.
By the way, the main noise present in our industrial setting
is vibration, but this is different from the noise mentioned in
this article.
Table II lists the reprojection errors of ten cameras under
different noise data. The following conclusions can be drawn:
1) SPO always performs best under all perturbations; 2) when
the perturbation is small (10% and 15%), SPO slightly per-
forms better than none-SPO; and 3) with the increasing noise,
SPO performs much better than none-SPO. For instance,
when the noise is 20% or 25%, the none-SPO even becomes
nonconvergent. These encouraging results show that the pro-
posed SPO algorithm can actually improve the calibration
accuracy.
E. Experiments With Varying Number of Cameras
Experiments were performed with different numbers of
cameras on the system described in Section IV-A. The loca-
tions of the used cameras and the layouts of the calibration
object are shown in Fig. 12.
Fig. 13. Results of experiments with varying number of cameras. (a) Average
values of the reprojection error. (b) Standard deviation error bars of the
reconstruction of the reference bar.
The reprojection error and the reference bar reconstruc-
tion error are used to evaluate the calibration performance.
As shown in Fig. 13(a), the largest reprojection error is
0.875 pixels, the smallest reprojection error is 0.0593 pixels.
The standard deviation error bars of the reconstruction of
reference bar, A3A4, are shown in Fig. 13(b), which is
obtained by 20 measurements. It can be seen that the mean
values of reconstruction errors are less than 0.05 mm, and
the standard deviations of reconstruction errors are less than
0.1 mm. Therefore, we can conclude that our proposed scheme
performs well for calibrating multicamera systems with differ-
ent numbers of cameras.
F. Comparative Experiments
We compare the proposed method with the classical cali-
bration method and Deng et al.’s [16] method to verify the
performance of the proposed method. For the experiment of
the classical calibration method, the 2-D calibration object
(Fig. 14) that used in the experiment is carefully manufactured

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 5016715 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 70, 2021

TABLE III
M EASUREMENT U NCERTAINTY OF S UBREFERENCE BARS

Fig. 14. Clearer image of the 2-D calibration object. Please check our
previous work [24] for more details about this object.
using high-precision manufacturing equipment, and the dis-
tance between adjacent feature points is 33 ± 0.01 mm [24].
It is worth noticing that we calibrate four adjacent cameras
each time. For instance, we first calibrate {C1, C2, C3, C4}
and {C3, C4, C5, C6}, and then use the public cameras
(C3 and C4) to transform all cameras to the GCS. For
the experiment of Deng’s method, the reference bar, A3A4,
in Fig. 6(c) is used for the calibration object. In this experi-
ment, 3000 frames of images of the reference bar are collected.
Some calibration images of the experiments collected by the
cameras are shown in Fig. 15.
As shown in Fig. 16, the average absolute error of the pro-
posed method in the x-axis direction and the y-axis direction
are 0.045262 and 0.048272 pixels, respectively, which are
smaller than the result obtained by the other two methods. The
standard deviations of our proposed method in the x-axis and
y-axis directions are 0.06323 and 0.06287, respectively, which
are much smaller than the result obtained by the other two
methods. Therefore, we can conclude that our method is more
robust and could achieve better calibration performance, which
also can be displayed more intuitively from error distribution
in Fig. 16.
The standard deviation error bars of the subreference
bars reconstruction with three calibration methods are shown
in Fig. 17, which is obtained by 20 measurements and gives
the stability of the measured distances. The schematic of
Fig. 15. Some calibration images of the experiments collected by the cameras.
(a) Some images of the proposed method. (b) Some images of the classical
calibration method. (c) Some images of Deng’s method.
how the reference bars are placed is shown in Fig. 18. The
results also perform statistical analysis for the evaluation of
the measurement uncertainty of the data with the standard
international methods [40]. The measurement uncertainties
are shown in Table III. It can be seen that the average
reconstruction errors of the proposed method are slightly
smaller than the result obtained by the other two methods.
The standard deviations of our proposed method are less
than 0.125 mm, which are much smaller than the result
obtained by the other two methods, 0.2 mm and 0.175 mm,
respectively. The measurement uncertainties of our method
are also significantly smaller than the other two methods.
Therefore, we can conclude that our method is more robust
and could achieve better calibration performance.
The time cost is a crucial factor in practical applications,
and thus, we further analyze the time cost of the three meth-
ods. We implement our proposed algorithm using the C++
language and perform the experiment on a personal computer
with the capability of 2.60-GHz CPU and 16.0-GB memory.
As shown in Fig. 19(a), we obtain the result by repeating
the experiment ten times, and the average time consumption
is 168.71 s for our method, 237.89 s for classical method,
319.20 s for Deng et al.’s [16] method. Therefore, we can
conclude that we are outstanding in time consumption.

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 TAO et al.: CONVENIENT AND HIGH-ACCURACY MULTICAMERA CALIBRATION METHOD 5016715

Fig. 16. Reprojection error of all spatial points successfully obtained. (a) Result of our proposed method. (b) Result of the 2-D classical calibration method.
(c) Result of Deng et al.’s [16] method.

Fig. 17. Standard deviation error bars of the subreference bars reconstruction with three calibration methods. The height of each error bar represents the
standard deviation, and the blue dot represents the average of 20 measurements. (a) Our proposed method. (b) 2-D classical method. (c) Deng’s method.

Fig. 19. Time consumption of different methods. (a) Total time. (b) Time
of each stage.

consumes significantly less time than the other two meth-

ods. In the stage of local calibration and global calibration,
our method consumes more time than the classic calibration
method, but in terms of total time, we are still the winner.

Fig. 18. Schematic of how the reference bars are placed in the measurement
volume.
To be more specific, the whole process of the methods can
mainly be separated into three steps, including image acqui-
sition, local calibration, and global calibration. Notice that
the time of image acquisition includes the time of manually
moving the calibration object and the time of automatically
acquiring the image by the cameras. The time consumption
of the involved three steps is shown in Fig. 19(b). As can be
found, in the image acquisition stage, our proposed method
G. Another System Experiments
To better evaluate the proposed method, we build another
multicamera system with different cameras, different lenses,
and different camera layouts. The measurement system is a
rectangular parallelepiped structure with a size of 1290 mm ×
1150 mm × 990 mm, which consists of 12 MV-CA050-20GM
cameras equipped with V1226-MPZ lenses distributed on two
parallel planes, as shown in Fig. 20. There are 12 ring light
sources coaxially distributed with the camera to improve the
lighting conditions of the system.

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 5016715 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 70, 2021
Fig. 20. Another system with different cameras, different lenses, and different
camera layouts.
Fig. 21. Calibration result of 12-camera system with our proposed method.
(a) Reprojection error of each camera. (b) Standard deviation error bars of the
measurement of the subreference bar. The height of the error bars represents
the standard deviation, the blue dots represent the average of 20 measurements,
and the red symbols represent a part of the measured value.
As shown in Fig. 21(a), the maximum reprojection error
is 0.12 pixels, which is similar to the experimental results
of the ten-camera system with the same method. With
20 measurements of each subreference bar, the standard devia-
tions of the measurements are shown in Fig. 21(b), which give
the stability of the measured distances. The standard deviations
of the reconstruction error are better than 0.125 mm, which
is similar to the experimental result of the ten-camera system
with the same method. Therefore, we can conclude that the
proposed method still has perfect performance for systems
with different layouts, different cameras, and different lenses.
V. C ONCLUSION
In this article, we propose a high-accuracy and convenient
method for the calibration of a multicamera system, which
does not need to prepare a high-accuracy calibration object.
To be specific, we first design a simple 3-D calibration
object, where dot-distribution coded targets are pasted on
a sphere. Then, we propose an efficient and high-accuracy
calibration method, which mainly consists of two powerful
modules, i.e., the optimal transformation path algorithm and
the SPO algorithm. The optimal transformation path algorithm
is designed to find the optimal path of the current camera
to the root camera, which reduces the length of the trans-
formation path and can further improve calibration precision.
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The SPO algorithm is proposed to well initialize the spatial
coordinates of feature points in the GCS, which can help
obtain a more robust initialization value and further improve
calibration accuracy. Finally, we build a multicamera system
with ten cameras, and extensive experiments conducted on
this system prove that the proposed method can improve
calibration accuracy effectively and meet the requirement of
industrial measurement.
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He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree with
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the State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang
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pp. 531–543, Apr. 2009. automation from Xidian University, Xi’an, China,
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[40] Uncertainty Measurement—Part 3: Guide to Expression Uncertainty Xidian University, in 2014.
Measurement (GUM: 1995), International Organization for Standard- She has been with the Shenyang Institute
ization, ISO, Geneva, Switzerland, 2008. of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences,
Shenyang, China, since 2014, where she is currently
an Assistant Professor. Her current research interests
include image processing and 3-D reconstruction.

Liming Tao received the M.E. degree from
Shandong University of Technology, Zibo, China,
in 2018. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D.
degree with the State Key Laboratory of Robotics,
Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese
Academy of Sciences, University of Chinese
Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, China.
His current research interests include computer
vision and pattern recognition.
Shengpeng Fu received the B.S. degree in logistics
engineering from Shandong University, Jinan, China,
in 2007, and the Ph.D. degree in mechanical
and electronic engineering from the University of
Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China,
in 2015.
He is currently an Associate Researcher with
the Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese
Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, China. His
research interests include computer vision and pat-
tern recognition.

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