A study on improving the calibration of body scanner built on multiple RGB-depth cameras

Purpose: The calibration is a key but cumbersome process for 3D body scanning using multiple depth cameras. The purpose of this paper is to simplify the calibration process by introducing a new method to calibrate the extrinsic parameters of multiple depth cameras simultaneously.

Design/methodology/approach: An improved method is introduced to enhance the accuracy based on the virtual checkerboards. Laplace coordinates are employed for a point-to-point adjustment to increase the accuracy of scanned data. A system with eight depth cameras is developed for full-body scanning, and the performance of this system is verified by actual results.

Findings: The agreement of measurements between scanned human bodies and the real subjects demonstrates the accuracy of the proposed method. The entire calibration process is automatic.

Originality/value: A complete algorithm for a full human body scanning system is introduced in this paper. This is the first publically study on the refinement and the point-by-point adjustment based on the virtual checkerboards toward the scanning accuracy enhancement.