Automatic Extrinsic Calibration for Lidar-Stereo Vehicle Sensor Setups
This addresses the calibration problem for automotive perception systems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing calibration techniques.
The paper tackles the tedious calibration process for lidar-stereo camera setups in vehicles by presenting an automatic extrinsic calibration method, demonstrating its usability and improvement over existing approaches through tests with real devices.
Sensor setups consisting of a combination of 3D range scanner lasers and stereo vision systems are becoming a popular choice for on-board perception systems in vehicles; however, the combined use of both sources of information implies a tedious calibration process. We present a method for extrinsic calibration of lidar-stereo camera pairs without user intervention. Our calibration approach is aimed to cope with the constraints commonly found in automotive setups, such as low-resolution and specific sensor poses. To demonstrate the performance of our method, we also introduce a novel approach for the quantitative assessment of the calibration results, based on a simulation environment. Tests using real devices have been conducted as well, proving the usability of the system and the improvement over the existing approaches. Code is available at http://wiki.ros.org/velo2cam_calibration