A Single-Pass Approach That Mines Unstructured Robotic Trajectories for Calibrating Surveillance Cameras

Abstract

The ubiquity of surveillance networks in public infrastructure presents a significant, yet underutilized, opportunity to assist vulnerable populations, particularly individuals who are blind or have low vision (BLV). However, transforming these passive video feeds into active guidance systems requires accurate camera calibration, a process that is traditionally labor-intensive and unscalable in large facilities. This paper introduces a novel, automated framework that leverages a mobile quadruped robot (Boston Dynamics Spot) as a dynamic calibration agent. We propose a single-pass approach with two planar calibration algorithms, which mines unstructured robotic trajectories to construct distinct geometric features on the ground plane. By synthesizing “virtual rectangles” from the robot’s odometry, our method first recovers camera focal length through vanishing point estimation by constructing virtual rectangles, and then solves for extrinsic 6-DoF pose using two algorithms: our proposed Virtual Rectangle (ViR) algorithm and a standard planar Perspective-n-Point (PnP) algorithm. Experimental validation using real-world data demonstrates the system’s robustness to sensor noise, maintaining focal length errors around 5%, rotational errors around 5° and relative translation errors of approximately 10%, while synthetic simulations indicate focal length errors generally under 10%, rotational errors under 1.5°, and translation errors also around 10% despite heavy image and object disturbances. This work eliminates the need for manual calibration targets for dynamic camera calibration, effectively converting static security infrastructure into a metric sensing network capable of supporting high-fidelity social robotics applications.