Calibration of large FOV thermal/visible hybrid binocular vision system

Hybrid Systems, formed by the combination of thermal and visible sensors, are superior or complementary to conventional visible-spectrum cameras for many applications. This paper proposes a method for large FOV thermal/visible hybrid binocular vision system calibration based on a new designed calibration pattern. Small circular constant heat reservoir are used as calibration marker for thermal cameras while the visible cameras can obtain the center of the concentric black-white circles as calibration marker with high precision. The proposed method can be used to simultaneously reference both thermal and visible cameras to a global coordinate frame. From the experiments we have obtained the mean re-projection error of calibration in 0.786 pixels at 10 meters. This method is simple and the results are acceptable.