Design and calibration of a single-camera-based stereo vision sensor

A low-cost, single camera model is introduced for the measurement of point coordinates in a 3-D space. By adding two groups of symmetrical reflectors, a single charge-coupled device (CCD) camera can be imaged as a pair of identical virtual cameras, from which a stereo pair of images of an object with parallax can be simultaneously obtained in one image plane and used to retrieve the 3-D coordinates of a point using triangulation. Doing so, the traditional dual-camera system is simplified as a single camera structure. The calibration method is also presented, which is simpler and easier to carry out than that for a dual-camera system. Experimental results show that the single camera method is efficient.