L2E: Lasers to Events for 6-DoF Extrinsic Calibration of Lidars and Event Cameras
This enables event cameras to integrate with lidars in perception tasks for low-power, latency-sensitive applications like autonomous vehicles, representing a novel solution rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of calibrating event cameras and lidars for robotics and autonomous vehicles by proposing a direct, temporally-decoupled extrinsic calibration method that exploits event cameras' high dynamic range and low latency to register lidar laser returns, achieving 6-DoF calibration without relying on frame-based cameras or manual measurements.
As neuromorphic technology is maturing, its application to robotics and autonomous vehicle systems has become an area of active research. In particular, event cameras have emerged as a compelling alternative to frame-based cameras in low-power and latency-demanding applications. To enable event cameras to operate alongside staple sensors like lidar in perception tasks, we propose a direct, temporally-decoupled extrinsic calibration method between event cameras and lidars. The high dynamic range, high temporal resolution, and low-latency operation of event cameras are exploited to directly register lidar laser returns, allowing information-based correlation methods to optimize for the 6-DoF extrinsic calibration between the two sensors. This paper presents the first direct calibration method between event cameras and lidars, removing dependencies on frame-based camera intermediaries and/or highly-accurate hand measurements.