Calibration of the Relative Orientation between Multiple Depth Cameras Based on a Three-Dimensional Target

Depth cameras play a vital role in three-dimensional (3D) shape reconstruction, machine vision, augmented/virtual reality and other visual information-related fields. However, a single depth camera cannot obtain complete information about an object by itself due to the limitation of the camera’s field of view. Multiple depth cameras can solve this problem by acquiring depth information from different viewpoints. In order to do so, they need to be calibrated to be able to accurately obtain the complete 3D information. However, traditional chessboard-based planar targets are not well suited for calibrating the relative orientations between multiple depth cameras, because the coordinates of different depth cameras need to be unified into a single coordinate system, and the multiple camera systems with a specific angle have a very small overlapping field of view. In this paper, we propose a 3D target-based multiple depth camera calibration method. Each plane of the 3D target is used to calibrate an independent depth camera. All planes of the 3D target are unified into a single coordinate system, which means the feature points on the calibration plane are also in one unified coordinate system. Using this 3D target, multiple depth cameras can be calibrated simultaneously. In this paper, a method of precise calibration using lidar is proposed. This method is not only applicable to the 3D target designed for the purposes of this paper, but it can also be applied to all 3D calibration objects consisting of planar chessboards. This method can significantly reduce the calibration error compared with traditional camera calibration methods. In addition, in order to reduce the influence of the infrared transmitter of the depth camera and improve its calibration accuracy, the calibration process of the depth camera is optimized. A series of calibration experiments were carried out, and the experimental results demonstrated the reliability and effectiveness of the proposed method.