DeepCalib: a deep learning approach for automatic intrinsic calibration of wide field-of-view cameras

Calibration of wide field-of-view cameras is a fundamental step for numerous visual media production applications, such as 3D reconstruction, image undistortion, augmented reality and camera motion estimation. However, existing calibration methods require multiple images of a calibration pattern (typically a checkerboard), assume the presence of lines, require manual interaction and/or need an image sequence. In contrast, we present a novel fully automatic deep learning-based approach that overcomes all these limitations and works with a single image of general scenes. Our approach builds upon the recent developments in deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN): our network automatically estimates the intrinsic parameters of the camera (focal length and distortion parameter) from a single input image. In order to train the CNN, we leverage the great amount of omnidirectional images available on the Internet to automatically generate a large-scale dataset composed of millions of wide field-of-view images with ground truth intrinsic parameters. Experiments successfully demonstrated the quality of our results, both quantitatively and qualitatively.