mrcal - camera calibrations and more! (original) (raw)

Because all other tools are terrible if you care about accuracy. They make basic questions like "how much data should I gather for a calibration?" and "how good is this calibration I just computed?" and "how different are these two models?" unanswerable. The previous state-of-the-art was good-enough for low-resolution cameras and long-focal-length lenses and low-range stereo. But today, the existing tools are often insufficient.

This toolkit allows the user to confidently produce calibrations that are as good as possible. It provides lots of visualization capabilities to evaluate various properties of a model solution. And it provides powerful analysis methods, such as model differencing and quantification of projection and triangulation uncertainty. To fit the real-world lens behavior mrcal loosens many assumptions common in other toolkits: the calibration chessboard isn't assumed to be flat, lenses aren't assumed to follow simple parametric models, rectified stereo isn't done with a pinhole model, and so on.

mrcal consists of