Enhanced Checkerboard Detection Using Gaussian Processes

Accurate checkerboard detection is of vital importance for computer vision applications, and a variety of checkerboard detectors have been developed in the past decades. While some detectors are able to handle partially occluded checkerboards, they fail when a large occlusion completely divides the checkerboard. We propose a new checkerboard detection pipeline for occluded checkerboards that has a robust performance under varying levels of noise, blurring, and distortion, and for a variety of imaging modalities. This pipeline consists of a checkerboard detector and checkerboard enhancement with Gaussian processes (GP). By learning a mapping from local board coordinates to image pixel coordinates via a Gaussian process, we can fill in occluded corners, expand the board beyond the image borders, allocate detected corners that do not fit an initial grid, and remove noise on the detected corner locations. We show that our method can improve the performance of other publicly available state-of-the-art checkerboard detectors, both in terms of accuracy and the number of corners detected. Our code and datasets are made publicly available. The checkerboard detector pipeline is contained within our Python checkerboard detection library, called PyCBD. The pipeline itself is modular and easy to adapt to different use cases.