My research was involved in the VIPA « Automatic Electric Vehicle for Passenger Transportation » project. During which, the LASMEA and its partnerships have developed vehicles able to navigate autonomously, without any outside dedicated infrastructure in an urban environment (parking lots, pedestrian areas, airports). Two cameras are rigidly embedded on a vehicle : one at the front, another at the back. Before being available for autonomous navigation tasks, the vehicle have to be calibrated and driven manually in order to build a visual 3D map (calibration and learning steps). Then, the vehicle will use this map to localize itself and drive autonomously. The goals of this thesis are to develop and apply user friendly methods, which calibrate this set of nonoverlapping cameras. After a first step of intrinsic calibration and a state of the art on multi-camera rigs, we develop and test several methods to extrinsically calibrate non-overlapping cameras (i.e. estimate the camera relative poses). The first method uses a planar mirror to create an overlap between views of the different cameras. The second procedure consists in manoeuvring the vehicle while each camera observes a static scene (composed of a set of targets, which are detected accurately). In a third procedure, we solve the 3D reconstruction and the extrinsic calibration problems simultaneously (the learning step can be used for that purpose) relying on visual features such as interest points. To achieve this goal a multi-camera bundle adjustment is proposed and implemented with a sparse data structures. Lastly, we present a calibration of the orientation of a multi-camera rig relative to the vehicle.
