I am trying to undistort a barrel/radial distortion from an image. When I see the equations they do not require the focal length of the camera. But the openCV API initundistortrectifymap requires them in form of the camera intrinsic matrix. Why so ? Anyway to do it without them? Because I understand the undistort is common for various distortion corrections.
The focal length is essential in distortion removal -since it provides info on the intrinsic parameters of the camera- and it is fairly simple to add it to the camera matrix. Just remember that you have to convert it from millimeters to pixels. This is done to ensure that the pixels are rectangular. For the conversion you need to know the sensor's height and width in millimeters, the horizontal (Sh) and vertical (Sv) number of pixels of the sensor and the focal length in millimeters. The conversion is done using the following equations:
fx = (f(mm) x Sh(px))/sensorwidth(mm)
fy = (f(mm) x Sv(px))/sensorheight(mm)
More on the camera matrix elements can be found here.