  The task of camera calibration is to estimate the intrinsic and extrinsic
parameters of a camera model. Though there are some restricted techniques to
infer the 3-D information about the scene from uncalibrated cameras, effective
camera calibration procedures will open up the possibility of using a wide
range of existing algorithms for 3-D reconstruction and recognition.
  The applications of camera calibration include vision-based metrology, robust
visual platooning and visual docking of mobile robots where the depth
information is important.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition