4 ms·
Hot take: Offline camera calibration is largely unneeded anymore. As long as you have an approximate starting point, collect about 5 minutes of data from all se
by dheera 2y ago
Hot take: Offline camera calibration is largely unneeded anymore. As long as you have an approximate starting point, collect about 5 minutes of data from all sensors and you have everything you need to reverse solve for the calibration.
Not saying it's easy, but solving it in software is O(1) and solving it by calibrating each device is O(N), and allows you to be resilient to things like temperature deformations and other nasty things that can happen in the field.
- jiggawatts 2y agoThere have been papers published about making robots and autopilot-like systems robust to all sorts of "system degradation" such as obstructed optics, missing signals, noisy signals, etc... I can't find the reference any more, but one particularly impressive result was a four-wheeled robot that could tolerate the loss of a wheel, distortions of the entire chassis, and multiple faulty sensors all at the same time!
- midjji 2y agoWell, its good that it works, but its intended for correcting for hardware defects, not hardware engineer defects.
- ryandamm 2y agoI agree, and I don't think this is a particularly hot take; if you've been working with camera systems, you've seen calibration without explicit calibration routines get better and better over the past few years. For critical imaging, you still want to calibrate, but the gap between explicit calibration and "implicit calibration" (just using your subject matter) is definitely getting smaller, and quickly.
- midjji 2y agoI disagree strongly, getting a coarse calibration which could be used for some stuff is one thing, getting a accurate one is another.
- doctorpangloss 2y agoNobody is going to sit around and wait for your app or website to collect 5 minutes of data for calibration. The browser doesn't let you collect all this sensor data. Mobile Safari doesn't tell you the known camera calibration. The Apple Vision Pro doesn't give you any data at all. Nonetheless, 8thwall's XR8 takes seconds to calibrate absolute scale. It has to do device lookup for approximate calibrations for your iPhone model.
- jfim 2y agoDepends on the use case. A car that requires five minutes of driving to calibrate its cameras once after exiting the factory would be completely acceptable. A drone that has a pre flight calibration when one first takes it out of the box would be okay.
- tjoff 2y agoWithout calibration do you know you are in spec? If I bought a car and 5 min into driving it tells me that the camera system is defective you are not gonna have a happy customer.
- watt 2y agoHow do you jump from OP "after exiting the factory" to your "bought a car and 5 min into driving" ? Those are two rather different things. Are you just looking for a pointless argument?
- tjoff 2y agoIf testing takes too long to be sustainable outsourcing it to the customer seemed like the suggestion? Admit perhaps a bad example but point still stands. Take the other example then: "pre flight calibration when one first takes it out of the box".
- jfim 2y agoRealistically, the dealership is likely to drive the car for a few minutes, if only to put it in the right place on the dealership lot, fill it with gas, and get it washed before delivering it to the customer. If there was an issue with the camera system it could be caught at that time.
- midjji 2y agoI guess you havent actually tried to do this, or you would emphasis the crucial important of, you still need a good initial guess, you still need to know the sync, and you still need data from the right environment with the right motions, and in the end, it will be worse.