It is well known that the accuracy of camera calibration is constrained by the size of the reference plate, it is difficult to fabricate large reference plates with high precision. Therefore, it is non-trivial to calibrate a camera with large field of view (FOV). In this paper, a method is proposed to construct a virtual large reference plate with high precision. Firstly, a high precision datum plane is constructed with a laser interferometer and one-dimensional air guideway, and then the reference plate is positioned at different locations and orientations in the FOV of the camera. The feature points of reference plate is projected to the datum plane to obtain a virtual large reference plate with high-precision. The camera are moved to several positions to get different virtual reference plates, and the camera is calibrated with the virtual reference plates. The experimental results show that the mean re-projection error of the camera calibrated with the proposed method is 0.062 pixels. The length of a scale bar with standard length of 959.778mm was measured with a vision system composed of two calibrated cameras, and the length measurement error is 0.389mm.