Effect of field of view on the accuracy of camera calibration

A long focal length lens can improve the spatial resolution and capture more detailed information, so it has been considered for three-dimensional (3D) vision reconstruction. However, the field of view (FOV) will narrow with a long focal length lens. It is a general concept that it is extremely difficult to achieve high-accuracy calibration of a narrow FOV camera because of paraxial imaging. In this paper an in-depth study on this issue is conducted from the aspect of perspective deformation. First, the perspective deformation of a point is divided into three parts. Then, the noise immunity of each part under different FOVs is discussed to reveal the root cause of the difficulty in the calibration of narrow FOV cameras. It is found that the calibration accuracy could be generally maintained at the same level if the image noise is inversely proportional to the focal length. Simulations verify the correctness of the inferences of this study that are hoped to be helpful in overcoming this disadvantage of narrow FOV cameras.