#+title: A tour of mrcal
#+OPTIONS: toc:nil

mrcal is a toolkit that provides improved methods for making and using camera
models (calibration, tracking, mapping, photogrammetry, etc).

The best way to convey a sense of the capabilities is to demonstrate some
real-world usage scenarios. So let's go through a full calibration sequence
starting with chessboard images, and eventually finishing with stereo processing
and triangulation. This page is a high-level overview of all the techniques that
make mrcal different and better than other tools. For more details, please see
the links in [[file:index.org][the main documentation]]. For /practical/ details, please see the
[[file:how-to-calibrate.org][how-to-calibrate page]] and the [[file:recipes.org][recipes page]].

All images in these articles have been gathered with a Sony Alpha 7 III SLR. I
want to stress-test the system, so I'm using the widest lens I can find: a
Samyang 12mm F2.8 fisheye lens. This lens has a ~ 180deg field of view corner to
corner, and about 160deg field of view horizontally.

In these demos I'm using only one camera, so I'm going to run a /monocular/
calibration to compute the intrinsics (the lens parameters). mrcal is fully able
to calibrate any N cameras at a time, I'm just using the one camera /here/.

The tour is split over a number of pages:

1. [[file:tour-initial-calibration.org][We gather calibration images, and perform some initial calibrations]]
2. [[file:tour-differencing.org][Differencing: we compare several of the calibrated models]]
3. [[file:tour-uncertainty.org][Uncertainty estimation: we compute the projection uncertainties of the models]]
4. [[file:tour-cross-validation.org][Cross-validation: we compare results of two
   different calibrations to gauge solution quality]]
5. [[file:tour-effect-of-range.org][We discuss the effect of range in differencing and uncertainty computations]]
6. [[file:tour-choreography.org][We use the uncertainty analysis to find the best chessboard-dancing technique]]
7. [[file:tour-stereo.org][Stereo processing]]
8. [[file:tour-triangulation.org][Triangulation]]
