Hand–eye calibration with epipolar constraints: Application to endoscopy

In this paper, we propose a new calibration method for a hand–eye system equipped with a camera undergoing radial distortion as a rigid endoscope. While classic methods propose either a separated estimation of the camera intrinsics and the hand–eye transform or a mixed non-linear estimation of both hand–eye and camera intrinsics assuming a pin-hole model, the proposed approach enables a simultaneous refinement of the hand–eye and the camera parameters including the distortion factor with only three frames of the calibrated pattern. We propose and compare two criteria to minimize: (i) the first one is based on the epipolar constraint between pairs of frames and (ii) the second one expresses the camera extrinsic with respect to hand–eye and world-grid transforms in the single frame reprojection error. We run bundle-adjustment on each criterion with respect to the distortion parameters, the camera intrinsics and the hand–eye transform. Our method allows us to recover more accurate 3D shapes when compared to state-of-the-art non-linear methods.

► The proposed method calibrates the hand–eye and the camera intrinsics including distortion.
► The epipolar prior is used to constrain the calibration.
► With 3 frames, our method is able to produce reliable calibration results.