Camera Calibration Using Catenary

In this work, we introduce a novel calibration technique based on a hanging chain curve replacing the checkerboard-based methods. It is a known physical phenomenon that a hanging chain or a flexible rope under gravity can be modeled by a special curve called a catenary. Therefore, instead of the commonly-used planar calibrator, we propose using multiple shots of a catenary-shaped chain for calibration. This approach can solve the out-of-focus problem which is faced in checkerboard calibration methods when the size of the board is not large enough. Although enlarging a planar calibrator increases the manufacturing time and cost, a simple label chain can create large planar areas as precise as a rigid checkerboard, is easily foldable and transportable. We compare the results of our proposed approach against the widely used checkerboard-based calibration as well as the state-of-the-art calibration methods and show that catenary-based calibration is much more accurate than checkerboard-based calibration by a very large margin and is also very competitive among the other approaches.