A Novel Method for the Extrinsic Calibration of a 2D Laser Rangefinder and a Camera

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new analytical method for extrinsic calibration of a camera and 2D Laser Rangefinder using point-to-plane constraints from a V-shaped pattern, improving accuracy over previous approaches.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel calibration technique that uses minimal observations and provides analytical solutions, overcoming ambiguities present in prior methods.

Findings

Achieves higher calibration accuracy than previous methods

Requires only a single observation of a V-shaped pattern

Validated with real and synthetic experiments

Abstract

We present a novel method for extrinsically calibrating a camera and a 2D Laser Rangefinder (LRF) whose beams are invisible from the camera image. We show that point-to-plane constraints from a single observation of a V-shaped calibration pattern composed of two non-coplanar triangles suffice to uniquely constrain the relative pose between two sensors. Next, we present an approach to obtain analytical solutions using point-to-plane constraints from single or multiple observations. Along the way, we also show that previous solutions, in contrast to our method, have inherent ambiguities and therefore must rely on a good initial estimate. Real and synthetic experiments validate our method and show that it achieves better accuracy than previous methods.