Out-of-focus color camera calibration with one normal-sized color-coded pattern

Conventional camera calibration methods always require well-focused target images for accurate feature detection. This requirement brings many challenges for long-range vision systems, due to the difficulty of fabricating an equivalent size target to the sensing field-of-view (FOV). This paper presents an out-of-focus color camera calibration method with one normal-sized color-coded pattern as the calibration target. The red, green and blue (RGB) channels of the color pattern are encoded with three phase-shift circular grating (PCG) arrays. The PCG centers used as feature points are extracted by ellipse fitting of the 2π-phase points. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve accurate calibration results even under severe defocus.