Invertibility and estimation of two-parameter polynomial and division lens distortion models

Abstract

In this paper, we study lens distortion for still images considering two well-known distortion models: the two-parameter polynomial model and the two-parameter division model. We study the invertibility of these models, and we mathematically characterize the conditions for the distortion parameters under which the distortion model defines a one-to-one transformation. This ensures that the inverse transformation is well defined and the distortion-free image can be properly computed, which provides robustness to the distortion models. A new automatic method to correct the radial distortion is proposed, and a comparative analysis for this method is extensively performed using the polynomial and the division models. With the aim of obtaining an accurate estimation of the model, we propose an optimization scheme which iteratively improves the parameters to achieve a better matching between the distorted lines and the edge points. The proposed method estimates two-parameter radial distortion models by detecting the longest distorted lines within the image. This is done by applying the Hough transform extended with a radial distortion parameter. Next, a two-parameter model is estimated using an iterative nonlinear optimization scheme. This scheme aims at minimizing the distance from the edge points to their associated lines by adjusting the two distortion parameters as well as the coordinates of the center of distortion. We present some experiments on real images with significant distortion to show the ability of the proposed approach to correct the radial distortion. A visual and quantitative comparison between both automatic two-parameter model estimations indicates that the division model is more efficient for those images showing strong distortion.