Zoom camera calibration in ROS?

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How about calibrating at several zoom positions and then validating your single calibration model against the experimental results?

Or, given that you already have multiple calibrations, maybe all other in-between calibrations could be a linear interpolation and you don't need a model at all.

One thing that will benefit you is that distortion ought to go down with greater zoom, so even if a model or interpolation scheme is not quite right for distortion as long as the distortion coefficients are getting smaller their effects are diminished.

You'll want to make a special node that subscribes to the camera image and then publishes the camera_info with the same timestamp (and rest of the header), some nodes are going to be subscribing to the Image and CameraInfo with a synchronizing message filter.

You may have to remap the fixed camera_info the camera driving is trying to publish to another topic so the namespaces are correct, lots of nodes only subscribe to /foo/camera_info if /foo/image_raw is the image topic.

Do you have a camera with an encodered zoom, or the actuated zoom is sufficiently repeatable this ought to work open loop only knowing the commanded zoom position?

I'd really like to hear what you end up discovering, please update this page with results.