Lens correction projection

Question

What is the simplest way to un-warp a photo made using fisheye or wide-angle lens? I'm looking a pixel projection formula that has few parameters. Camera and lens parameters will not be known, so user has to change the parameters visually. Thanks

Answer 1

I would assume you could use the lens equation to do it.

1/f = 1/object_distance + 1/image_distance

Where f is the focal length (the user input). The ratio of image distance and object distance could be used to resize the image appropriately, using the magnification equation. To get what you really want, then, you need to restructure the equation:

1/object_distance = 1/f - 1/image_distance

And then use the magnification equation to use the object height to resize:

-image_distance/object_distance = image_height/object_height

The catch, as you may have noticed, is that you need to know the distance each pixel is away from the camera. Otherwise, it simply doesn't work. You could ask the user for that information, but that seems unlikely, and painful. I don't know of any other way to do it-- lens distortion is a 3D effect, and you're given 2D information. At best you can attempt to correct it two-dimensionally, but this will be difficult, and won't work properly.

Answer 2

If its possible you should ask the user to take a photograph of a reference image (a chess board for example) using the same camera and then use this information to analyze the lens characteristics. This information can then be used to un-warp the other photographs taken by the same camera.

For implementation you could use neural networks/genetic algorithms.

Answer 3

There is a good paper here that provides some decent looking mathematical models for lens distortion. It's at least. SDX2000 was kind of on the right track with the grid I think. I think the most common way to approach the problem is to map the image to a grid and then allow warping parameters to be applied to produce pincushion and barrel distortion. See the lens distortion filters in Lightroom or Photoshop as an example.