camera extrinsic calibration - computer-vision

Question

I have a fisheye camera, which I have already calibrated. I need to calculate the camera pose w.r.t a checkerboard just by using a single image of said checkerboard,the intrinsic parameters, and the size of the squares of the checkerboards. Unfortunately many calibration libraries first calculate the extrinsic parameters from a set of images and then the intrinsic parameters, which is essentially the "inverse" procedure of what I want. Of course I can just put my checkerboard image inside the set of other images I used for the calibration and run the calib procedure again, but it's very tedious, and moreover, I can't use a checkerboard of different size from the ones used for the instrinsic calibration. Can anybody point me in the right direction?
EDIT: After reading francesco's answer, I realized that I didn't explain what I mean by calibrating the camera. My problem begins with the fact that I don't have the classic intrinsic parameters matrix (so I can't actually use the method Francesco described).In fact I calibrated the fisheye camera with the Scaramuzza's procedure (https://sites.google.com/site/scarabotix/ocamcalib-toolbox), which basically finds a polynom which maps 3d world points into pixel coordinates( or, alternatively, the polynom which backprojects pixels to the unit sphere). Now, I think these information are enough to find the camera pose w.r.t. a chessboard, but I'm not sure exactly how to proceed.

Answer 1

the solvePnP procedure calculates extrinsic pose for Chess Board (CB) in camera coordinates. openCV added a fishEye library to its 3D reconstruction module to accommodate significant distortions in cameras with a large field of view. Of course, if your intrinsic matrix or transformation is not a classical intrinsic matrix you have to modify PnP:
Undo whatever back projection you did
Now you have so-called normalized camera where intrinsic matrix effect was eliminated.
k*[u,v,1]T = R|T * [x, y, z, 1]T
The way to solve this is to write the expression for k first:
k=R20*x+R21*y+R22*z+Tz
then use the above expression in
k*u = R00*x+R01*y+R02*z+Tx
k*v = R10*x+R11*y+R12*z+Tx
you can rearrange the terms to get Ax=0, subject to |x|=1, where unknown
x=[R00, R01, R02, Tx, R10, R11, R12, Ty, R20, R21, R22, Tz]T
and A, b
are composed of known u, v, x, y, z - pixel and CB corner coordinates;
Then you solve for x=last column of V, where A=ULVT, and assemble rotation and translation matrices from x. Then there are few ‘messy’ steps that are actually very typical for this kind of processing:
A. Ensure that you got a real rotation matrix - perform orthogonal Procrustes on your R2 = UVT, where R=ULVT
B. Calculate scale factor scl=sum(R2(i,j)/R(i,j))/9;
C. Update translation vector T2=scl*T and check for Tz>0; if it is negative invert T and negate R;
Now, R2, T2 give you a good starting point for non linear algorithm optimization such as Levenberg Marquardt. It is required because a previous linear step optimizes only an algebraic error of parameters while non-linear one optimizes a correct metrics such as squared error in pixel distances. However, if you don’t want to follow all these steps you can take advantage of the fish-eye library of openCV.

Answer 2

I assume that by "calibrated" you mean that you have a pinhole model for your camera.
Then the transformation between your chessboard plane and the image plane is a homography, which you can estimate from the image of the corners using the usual DLT algorithm. You can then express it as the product, up to scale, of the matrix of intrinsic parameters A and [x y t], where x and y columns are the x and y unit vectors of the world's (i.e. chessboard's) coordinate frame, and t is the vector from the camera centre to the origin of that same frame. That is:
H = scale * A * [x|y|t]
Therefore
[x|y|t] = 1/scale * inv(A) * H
The scale is chosen so that x and y have unit length. Once you have x and y, the third axis is just their cross product.