Lately the interest of Computer Vision and Photogrammetry community has been focused on the automation of the processes of identification and elimination of the radial distortion, with the aim to correct the image coordinates and finally to obtain digital images with reliable geometric information. This effort has reached the point of development of commercial or free image processing software, claiming that it can automatically identify and remove the radial distortion from an image. In this paper in depth research has been conducted about the radial distortion and the methods of its identification and elimination. Specifically, it has been attempted to evaluate software as the aforementioned, about its effectiveness, accuracy and applicability on the elimination of the radial distortion from images. For the attainment of the desired aim, four different methods of comparison and evaluation of the performance of the software, with respect to the correction of an image, have been employed. The applied methods are (i) the optical evaluation of the produced digital images, (ii) the subtraction of the images, (iii) the comparison of the curves of the remaining radial distortion in the images and (iv) the comparison of the results from the orientation of an image pair. However, it was really important to have a benchmark for the evaluation, in order to ensure the objectivity and accuracy of the comparison. Therefore, a new reliable algorithm has been developed, which was of known and controllable accuracy. The results of these comparisons are presented and evaluated for their reliability and usefulness.

Date Published: 21 June 2015
PDF: 15 pages
Proc. SPIE 9528, Videometrics, Range Imaging, and Applications XIII, 95280C (21 June 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2184569

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9528:
Videometrics, Range Imaging, and Applications XIII
Fabio Remondino; Mark R. Shortis, Editor(s)