Line-based camera calibration with lens distortion correction from a single image

•A line-based camera calibration method from a single image is proposed.•The lens distortion is corrected independent of pin-hole camera model.•The normalized line-based homography estimation is employed.•The proposed method gives a comparable result in contrast with multi-view based method.

Camera calibration is a fundamental and important step in many machine vision applications. For some practical situations, computing camera parameters from merely a single image is becoming increasingly feasible and significant. However, the existing single view based calibration methods have various disadvantages such as ignoring lens distortion, requiring some prior knowledge or special calibration environment, and so on. To address these issues, we propose a line-based camera calibration method with lens distortion correction from a single image using three squares with unknown length. Initially, the radial distortion coefficients are obtained through a non-linear optimization process which is isolated from the pin-hole model calibration, and the detected distorted lines of all the squares are corrected simultaneously. Subsequently, the corresponding lines used for homography estimation are normalized to avoid the specific unstable case, and the intrinsic parameters are calculated from the sufficient restrictions provided by vectors of homography matrix. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, both simulative and real experiments have been carried out and the results show that the proposed method is robust under general conditions and it achieves comparable measurement accuracy in contrast with the traditional multiple view based calibration method using 2D chessboard target.