Zhiwei Huang

Zhiwei Huang, Yikang Zhang, Qijun Chen et al.

LiDAR-camera extrinsic calibration (LCEC) is crucial for data fusion in intelligent vehicles. Offline, target-based approaches have long been the preferred choice in this field. However, they often demonstrate poor adaptability to real-world environments. This is largely because extrinsic parameters may change significantly due to moderate shocks or during extended operations in environments with vibrations. In contrast, online, target-free approaches provide greater adaptability yet typically lack robustness, primarily due to the challenges in cross-modal feature matching. Therefore, in this article, we unleash the full potential of large vision models (LVMs), which are emerging as a significant trend in the fields of computer vision and robotics, especially for embodied artificial intelligence, to achieve robust and accurate online, target-free LCEC across a variety of challenging scenarios. Our main contributions are threefold: we introduce a novel framework known as MIAS-LCEC, provide an open-source versatile calibration toolbox with an interactive visualization interface, and publish three real-world datasets captured from various indoor and outdoor environments. The cornerstone of our framework and toolbox is the cross-modal mask matching (C3M) algorithm, developed based on a state-of-the-art (SoTA) LVM and capable of generating sufficient and reliable matches. Extensive experiments conducted on these real-world datasets demonstrate the robustness of our approach and its superior performance compared to SoTA methods, particularly for the solid-state LiDARs with super-wide fields of view.

Yu Han, Zhiwei Huang, Yanting Zhang et al.

Point-pixel registration between LiDAR point clouds and camera images is a fundamental yet challenging task in autonomous driving and robotic perception. A key difficulty lies in the modality gap between unstructured point clouds and structured images, especially under sparse single-frame LiDAR settings. Existing methods typically extract features separately from point clouds and images, then rely on hand-crafted or learned matching strategies. This separate encoding fails to bridge the modality gap effectively, and more critically, these methods struggle with the sparsity and noise of single-frame LiDAR, often requiring point cloud accumulation or additional priors to improve reliability. Inspired by recent progress in detector-free matching paradigms (e.g. MatchAnything), we revisit the projection-based approach and introduce the detector-free framework for direct point-pixel matching between LiDAR and camera views. Specifically, we project the LiDAR intensity map into a 2D view from the LiDAR perspective and feed it into an attention-based detector-free matching network, enabling cross-modal correspondence estimation without relying on multi-frame accumulation. To further enhance matching reliability, we introduce a repeatability scoring mechanism that acts as a soft visibility prior. This guides the network to suppress unreliable matches in regions with low intensity variation, improving robustness under sparse input. Extensive experiments on KITTI, nuScenes, and MIAS-LCEC-TF70 benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming prior approaches on nuScenes (even those relying on accumulated point clouds), despite using only single-frame LiDAR.

Zhiwei Huang, Jiaqi Li, Hongbo Zhao et al.

LiDAR-camera extrinsic calibration (LCEC) is crucial for multi-modal data fusion in autonomous robotic systems. Existing methods, whether target-based or target-free, typically rely on customized calibration targets or fixed scene types, which limit their applicability in real-world scenarios. To address these challenges, we present EdO-LCEC, the first environment-driven online calibration approach. Unlike traditional target-free methods, EdO-LCEC employs a generalizable scene discriminator to estimate the feature density of the application environment. Guided by this feature density, EdO-LCEC extracts LiDAR intensity and depth features from varying perspectives to achieve higher calibration accuracy. To overcome the challenges of cross-modal feature matching between LiDAR and camera, we introduce dual-path correspondence matching (DPCM), which leverages both structural and textural consistency for reliable 3D-2D correspondences. Furthermore, we formulate the calibration process as a joint optimization problem that integrates global constraints across multiple views and scenes, thereby enhancing overall accuracy. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that EdO-LCEC outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly in scenarios involving sparse point clouds or partially overlapping sensor views.