Self-Calibrating Polarising Radiometric Calibration

Daniel Teo, Boxin Shi, Yinqiang Zheng, Sai-Kit Yeung; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2018, pp. 2831-2839

We present a self-calibrating polarising radiometric calibration method. From a set of images taken from a single viewpoint under different unknown polarising angles, we recover the inverse camera response function and the polarising angles relative to the first angle. The problem is solved in an integrated manner, recovering both of the unknowns simultaneously. The method exploits the fact that the intensity of polarised light should vary sinusoidally as the polarising filter is rotated, provided that the response is linear. It offers the first solution to demonstrate the possibility of radiometric calibration through polarisation. We evaluate the accuracy of our proposed method using synthetic data and real world objects captured using different cameras. The self-calibrated results were found to be comparable with those from multiple exposure sequence.