Single-Shot Intrinsic Calibration for Autonomous Driving Applications

In this paper, we present a first-of-its-kind method to determine clear and repeatable guidelines for single-shot camera intrinsic calibration using multiple checkerboards. With the help of a simulator, we found the position and rotation intervals that allow optimal corner detector performance. With these intervals defined, we generated thousands of multiple checkerboard poses and evaluated them using ground truth values, in order to obtain configurations that lead to accurate camera intrinsic parameters. We used these results to define guidelines to create multiple checkerboard setups. We tested and verified the robustness of the guidelines in the simulator, and additionally in the real world with cameras with different focal lengths and distortion profiles, which help generalize our findings. Finally, we used a 3D LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) to project and confirm the quality of the intrinsic parameters projection. We found it possible to obtain accurate intrinsic parameters for 3D applications, with at least seven checkerboard setups in a single image that follow our positioning guidelines.