Camera calibration with enclosing ellipses by an extended application of generalized eigenvalue decomposition

Conics-based calibration has been widely inves- tigated in the past several years. The primary method is to utilize the generalized eigenvalue decomposition (GED) of conics. In this paper, we extend the GED method to deal with a general case: two enclosing ellipses. We construct a link between enclosing ellipses and confocal conics. The homography is, thus, decomposed to three components, each of which corresponds to a clear geometrical meaning. Other general conics cases including separate case, intersecting case and hyperbolas case are also discussed. Experiments with simulated and real data demonstrate the good performance of our camera calibration algorithms.