Written by Alexander Velizhev

http://research.graphicon.ru/calibration/recommendations-for-taking-calibration-photos.html

Attention! Verify your calibration pattern size. If you have entered wrong object dimentions detection will run incorrectly. It runs only with calibration patterns using odd x even (or even x odd) number of squares (i.e 5×6, 7×8, 10×7, etc).

Recommendations

• The white space (marked with red on the picture below) between the outer squares and the object boundary should be at least 1 square wide, like this:

  

  Figure 1. Calibration pattern

• All the squares must be clearly visible (unoccluded).

• Use a tripod

• Take 25 images and more

• Use a paper size ".3" and more

• Square size is 3-5 cm

• The chessboard on the images must be located in the all places of the camera matrix 

  

  Figure 2. Point density

• The chessboard must be plane

• Take photos from these positions + from the top of the chessboard

  

  Figure 3. Camera positions

• The tilt angle is constant (for example 45 deg)

  

  Figure 4. Tilt angle

• Take photos with three camera positions

  

  Figure 5. Tilts of the camera

Another thing is that I actually tested only on my images, so maybe my modifications won’t help other people to do their calibration. If so – send me your image sequences, I’ll try to tune up my method to work with them also.