Assessing the Influence of Temperature Changes on the Geometric Stability of Smartphone- and Raspberry Pi Cameras

Knowledge about the interior and exterior camera orientation parameters is required to establish the relationship between 2D image content and 3D object data. Camera calibration is used to determine the interior orientation parameters, which are valid as long as the camera remains stable. However, information about the temporal stability of low-cost cameras due to the physical impact of temperature changes, such as those in smartphones, is still missing. This study investigates on the one hand the influence of heat dissipating smartphone components at the geometric integrity of implemented cameras and on the other hand the impact of ambient temperature changes at the geometry of uncoupled low-cost cameras considering a Raspberry Pi camera module that is exposed to controlled thermal radiation changes. If these impacts are neglected, transferring image measurements into object space will lead to wrong measurements due to high correlations between temperature and camera’s geometric stability. Monte-Carlo simulation is used to simulate temperature-related variations of the interior orientation parameters to assess the extent of potential errors in the 3D data ranging from a few millimetres up to five centimetres on a target in X- and Y-direction. The target is positioned at a distance of 10 m to the camera and the Z-axis is aligned with camera’s depth direction.