•  
  •  
 

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract

Abstract: This paper presents a full-field thermal displacement inversion and dynamic disparity compensation method to address the disparity drift issue in mass-produced automotive-grade stereo cameras induced by thermal expansion and rigid-body displacement of image sensors under wide-temperature-range operating conditions. The proposed method leverages a high-precision static speckle pattern and digital image correlation (DIC) technique to achieve quantitative characterization of the nonuniform horizontal thermal deformation fields of the left and right image sensors. On this basis, a dynamic disparity compensation model is established, integrating a temperature-dependent quadratic polynomial translation term and a radial thermal expansion correction term. Experiments were conducted by heating the camera from 35 °C to 70 °C while synchronously acquiring speckle images, enabling quantitative extraction of the full-field displacement evolution of the sensors in both X and Y directions. The results reveal that the thermally induced sensor displacement consists of two superimposed components: a global rigid-body translation and a radial expansion centered at the image origin, with a maximum translation of approximately 0.5 pixels. The compensation model built upon these findings effectively corrects the thermal-induced disparity bias. In simulated on-road ranging tests, without compensation, the maximum ranging errors at 5 m for the center and edge corner points were 2.44% and 3.02%, respectively, and reached 4.87% and 5.42% at 10 m. After applying the proposed compensation model, these errors were reduced to 0.68% and 0.92% at 5 m, and to 1.43% and 2.47% at 10 m, corresponding to an overall ranging accuracy improvement of 65%-72%. This study elucidates the coupling mechanism between thermal strain and stereo ranging errors, offering an engineering solution for high-robustness ranging of vehicle-mounted stereo vision systems under complex temperature-varying conditions.

First Page

2450

Last Page

2463

CLC

TP391.9

Recommended Citation

Wang Bisheng, Hu Xiyuan, Meng Ran, et al. Thermal Displacement Quantification and Dynamic Disparity Compensation for Automotive Stereo Cameras[J]. Journal of System Simulation, 2026, 38(9): 2450-2463.

Corresponding Author

Hu Xiyuan

DOI

10.16182/j.issn1004731x.joss.26-0413

Download

Share

COinS