L2M-Calib: One-key Calibration Method for LiDAR and Multiple Magnetic Sensors

TL;DR

L2M-Calib introduces a one-key calibration method for magnetic and LiDAR sensors, jointly estimating extrinsic and intrinsic parameters to improve multimodal sensor fusion accuracy in challenging environments.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel calibration framework combining Gauss-Newton optimization and w-RRTLS for magnetic-LiDAR systems, addressing the lack of effective calibration techniques.

Findings

Achieves high calibration accuracy in simulated and real-world tests.

Demonstrates robustness under diverse environmental conditions.

Effective calibration of extrinsic and intrinsic parameters in a unified framework.

Abstract

Multimodal sensor fusion enables robust environmental perception by leveraging complementary information from heterogeneous sensing modalities. However, accurate calibration is a critical prerequisite for effective fusion. This paper proposes a novel one-key calibration framework named L2M-Calib for a fused magnetic-LiDAR system, jointly estimating the extrinsic transformation between the two kinds of sensors and the intrinsic distortion parameters of the magnetic sensors. Magnetic sensors capture ambient magnetic field (AMF) patterns, which are invariant to geometry, texture, illumination, and weather, making them suitable for challenging environments. Nonetheless, the integration of magnetic sensing into multimodal systems remains underexplored due to the absence of effective calibration techniques. To address this, we optimize extrinsic parameters using an iterative Gauss-Newton scheme, coupled with the intrinsic calibration as a weighted ridge-regularized total least squares (w-RRTLS) problem, ensuring robustness against measurement noise and ill-conditioned data. Extensive evaluations on both simulated datasets and real-world experiments, including AGV-mounted sensor configurations, demonstrate that our method achieves high calibration accuracy and robustness under various environmental and operational conditions.