Thank you for your reply.
I have a Sony Alpha 7R with a macro lens. I’ve already gone through Hartley & Zisserman’s work, and I highly recommend it because it feels very comprehensive. It covers almost everything. While it serves as a solid theoretical reference, in my optinion it lacks real-world applications. The examples in the book are interesting, but they often lack more in-depth explanations.
Going back to my initial question, my current assumption is that I don’t necessarily need to perform a full camera calibration. That said, I’m skeptical about relying on algorithms to accurately capture the real distortions, especially when accounting for lens distortion. In Zhang’s “A Flexible New Technique for Camera Calibration”, the Maximum-Likelihood Method aims to improve the overall camera model rather than focus on obtaining the most precise distortion coefficients. The distortion model adds two degrees of freedom to enhance the model as a whole, rather than fine-tuning distortion accuracy. (In other words, the optimization ensures the local optimal parameters for the entirety of the model parameters, including the focal length’s, skew, principal point, distortion coefficients, etc… However, it doesn’t guarantee that the distortion coefficients found are optimal. Correct me if I’m wrong.)