Calibration for stereo vision system based on phase matching and bundle adjustment algorithm

•A high accurate and speed calibration method for stereo vision system is proposed.•The proposed calibration method combines the phase matching method with bundle adjustment algorithm.•The measurement RMS error can reach 0.025 mm when measuring the standard appliance with nominal length of 999.576 mm.•The procedure of calibration takes less than 3 s.

Calibration for stereo vision system plays an important role in the field of machine vision applications. The existing accurate calibration methods are usually carried out by capturing a high-accuracy calibration target with the same size as the measurement view. In in-situ 3D measurement and in large field of view measurement, the extrinsic parameters of the system usually need to be calibrated in real-time. Furthermore, the large high-accuracy calibration target in the field is a big challenge for manufacturing. Therefore, an accurate and rapid calibration method in the in-situ measurement is needed. In this paper, a novel calibration method for stereo vision system is proposed based on phase-based matching method and the bundle adjustment algorithm. As the camera is usually mechanically locked once adjusted appropriately after calibrated in lab, the intrinsic parameters are usually stable. We emphasize on the extrinsic parameters calibration in the measurement field. Firstly, the matching method based on heterodyne multi-frequency phase-shifting technique is applied to find thousands of pairs of corresponding points between images of two cameras. The large amount of pairs of corresponding points can help improve the accuracy of the calibration. Then the method of bundle adjustment in photogrammetry is used to optimize the extrinsic parameters and the 3D coordinates of the measured objects. Finally, the quantity traceability is carried out to transform the optimized extrinsic parameters from the 3D metric coordinate system into Euclid coordinate system to obtain the ultimate optimal extrinsic parameters. Experiment results show that the procedure of calibration takes less than 3 s. And, based on the stereo vision system calibrated by the proposed method, the measurement RMS (Root Mean Square) error can reach 0.025 mm when measuring the calibrated gauge with nominal length of 999.576 mm.