Quantifying and Improving Stereo Camera Calibration Robustness: An Outlier-Aware Algorithm for Digital Twin Data Acquisition

As calibration errors have a direct impact on epipolar consistency, rectification accuracy, and metric 3D reconstruction performance, stereo camera calibration is a fundamental requirement for high-accuracy 3D modeling and reliable digital twin data acquisition. Because current calibration workflows (based on pairwise calibration methods) lack systematic data-quality checks mechanisms, there is a clear need for more robust data selection strategies. The novelty of the approach consists in the development of a new outlier-aware stereo calibration algorithm (OutAw) that introduces a unified multi-stage approach that integrates hard geometric selection, candidate subset generation, multi-criterion ranking, bootstrap stability analysis, and triangulation assessment into a comprehensive and systematic calibration framework. Unlike conventional approaches, OutAw (through its mechanism of detecting and rejecting inconsistent pairs) redefines the calibration strategy from arbitrary to criterion-based data selection. Also, the proposed algorithm is compared with BSC (a baseline OpenCV all-pairs calibration algorithm) and InterFil (an intermediate filtered variant) using 49 stereo pairs (at 1280 × 720 resolution) captured using a planar checkerboard. OutAw algorithm achieved (using only nine image pairs) superior results (epipolar error 0.5119 px, stereo RMS 0.7666 px) to the BSC ones (epipolar error 1.3687 px, stereo RMS 1.9385 px), representing statistically significant improvements (60.5%, respectively 62.3%). OutAw geometric consistency was validated by triangulation-based metrics (square-length standard deviation 0.1140 mm and square absolute error 0.1097 mm). Contamination analysis revealed that as the outlier rate increases, the calibration process degrades progressively. Also, the results obtained highlight that geometric quality-driven image selection is critical for achieving a reliable stereo calibration for DT applications.