【正文】
a much larger field of view than mon cameras, and is able to capture more information from the environment. Thus, it plays an important role in kinds of applications which desire more information with fewer cameras, such as supervisory systems, visions of mobile robots, visions in manufacturing systems, etc. In our 3D welding seam extraction system, a wideangle lens is adopted to capture the welding seam information. However, the sever image distortion brought in by the wideangle lens should be tackled in order to meet the reconstruction precision as high as . The realtime ability of the welding seam system puts forward another requirement. Therefore, a simple and efficient method for calibrating camera lens distortion should be proposed. In this paper, we introduced our welding seam extraction system which aimed to extract the welding seam from two CCD cameras with wideangle lenses. In order to satisfy the precision requirement, the distortion of the image must be dealt with. Based on this background, we have proposed a distortion measure that can be utilized to calibrate the radial and decentering distortion parameters of the wideangle lens. In future, we will consider the effect of the noise and analyze the robustness o