Drone Camera Calibration via Neural and Heuristic Method: RI Summer Scholar Longwen Zhang

Drone Camera Calibration via Neural and Heuristic Method
Longwen Zhang, RISS 2021 Cohort

Camera calibration is an indispensable part of drone tasks, especially in tasks that need to reconstruct the colored RGB surface. In order to make the reconstructed color better match the user’s perception, white balance and vignetting reduction are mainly needed. Despite the existence of tools such as automatic white balance correction, drones in the production environment still mainly perform camera calibration by manually calibrating colors with a standard color chart before every flight to ensure color consistency during the whole flight. To this end, this work proposes a neural-network-based method to replace manual operations, which enables automatic white balance and vignetting reduction through multiple cameras with a few shot on a color chart. The proposed method can accurately detect arbitrary color charts without any prior knowledge and adopt optimization to accomplish calibration. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for automatic camera calibration even using edge devices.

QUICK DATES AND INFORMATION:
- Applications are open November 1
- Program runs June 1 through the first week of August
- Scholarships for both U.S. and International Undergraduate Students Available
- Hosted by the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh

SCHOLARSHIPS: The RISS program partners and community provides extensive scholarships for students selected to participate. Scholarships are available to students from across the US and world.

RESEARCH RESULTS:

- Scholars contribute to robotics research projects through a guided research experience with multiple layers of mentorship
- Scholars learn how to effectively communicate research ideas to various audiences (e.g., sponsors, academic audience, novice audiences) and in various formats (e.g., elevator pitches, short talks, research papers, and poster presentations).
- Scholars forge long-lasting connections to Carnegie Mellon University researchers and partners.

Robotics Workshops & Talks: The technical professional development series exposes scholars to a wide range of robotics applications and projects through weekly robotics talks, visits to labs, and hands- on workshops.