Method and apparatus for determining points of interest on an image of a camera calibration object

Abstract

The present invention allows for the locations of points of interest in a calibration object in a calibration image for a digital camera to be identified automatically. The image is an array of pixels corresponding to the calibration object, which has a known reference pattern. In a preferred embodiment, the invention includes receiving an array of pixels produced by a camera, classifying each pixel of the image as light or dark, extracting contours from the image by identifying lines between light and dark pixels, comparing the extracted contours to the shapes of the known reference pattern, and identifying the shapes of the known reference pattern in the image using the extracted contours. Preferably, the image is a color image, and the color information in the pixels of the image are converted into gray scale values to render the image as a gray scale image before the pixels are classified. Classifying each pixel includes applying a brightness threshold to each pixel of the image to classify those pixels having a brightness greater than the threshold as light and those below the threshold as dark.