Acquisition of high-quality images for camera calibration in robotics applications via speech prompts

Accurate intrinsic and extrinsic camera calibration can be an important prerequisite for robotic applications that rely on vision as input. While there is ongoing research on enabling camera calibration using natural images, many systems in practice still rely on using designated calibration targets with e.g. checkerboard patterns or April tag grids. Once calibration images from different perspectives have been acquired and feature descriptors detected, those are typically used in an optimization process to minimize the geometric reprojection error. For this optimization to converge, input images need to be of sufficient quality and particularly sharpness; they should neither contain motion blur nor rolling-shutter artifacts that can arise when the calibration board was not static during image capture. In this work, we present a novel calibration image acquisition technique controlled via voice commands recorded with a clip-on microphone, that can be more robust and user-friendly than e.g. triggering capture with a remote control, or filtering out blurry frames from a video sequence in postprocessing. To achieve this, we use a state-of-the-art speech-to-text transcription model with accurate per-word timestamping to capture trigger words with precise temporal alignment. Our experiments show that the proposed method improves user experience by being fast and efficient, allowing us to successfully calibrate complex multi-camera setups.