How to Calibrate Camera Optics

Introduction

Calibration of camera optics is required to find out the values of the following parameters:

• Focal length
• Shift of camera principal point from the center of image
• Radial distortion parameters (2 — 4 coefficients)
• Pixel aspect ratio (optional)
• Pixel shear (optional)

This procedure is strongly mandatory for modern wide-angle cameras including action cameras. The thing is that these cameras has significant distortion.

Note: As to web-cameras usable with iPi Motion Capture (Sony PS3 Eye and Logitech C922), they have optics with low distortion and principal point shift is not significant as a rule. For this reason camera optics calibration is not required for them. But if you want, you can calibrate them and apply results of this calibration to recorded video using Build Combined Video tool of iPi Recorder application.