Camera calibration by using weighted differential evolution algorithm: a comparative study with ABC, PSO, COBIDE, DE, CS, GWO, TLBO, MVMO, FOA, LSHADE, ZHANG and BOUGUET

Camera calibration is an avoidable process for computational vision applications, such as 3D reverse engineering, industrial robot calibration, optic-pattern recognition, simultaneous localization and mapping, autonomous visual-driving and photogrammetric vision. The camera calibration problem is too complex, nonlinear and multimodal. Traditional camera calibration methods using gradient-based optimization often trap to one of the many local solutions available. Accurate computation ability of traditional camera calibration methods is limited since they use gradient-based optimization methods. Since evolutionary computing algorithms can avoid local solutions of numerical problems, they have the potential to accurately compute the required camera calibration parameters for high-precision computational vision applications. In this paper, the camera calibration parameters are computed by using 11 evolutionary computing algorithms, i.e., WDE, ABC, PSO, COBIDE, DE, CS, GWO, TLBO, MVMO, FOA and LSHADE. In order to make unbiased evaluation of the camera calibration results provided by the related evolutionary computing algorithms, two gradient-based traditional camera calibration methods, i.e., Zhang and Bouguet, have been used in the conducted experiments in this paper. The camera calibration results of the related methods were used to model a 3D physical test scene by using Structure from Motion photogrammetry method. The reference data set of the related 3D physical scene has been captured by using a 3D terrestrial laser scanner. Statistical comparison of the camera calibration results exposed that WDE supplies statistically better results than other comparison algorithms.