Extrinsic self calibration of a camera and a 3D laser range finder from natural scenes

— In this paper, we describe a new approach for the extrinsic calibration of a camera with a 3D laser range finder, that can be done on the fly. This approach does not require any calibration object. Only few point correspondences (at least 4) are used, which are manually selected by the user from a scene viewed by the two sensors. The proposed method relies on a novel technique to visualize the range information obtained from a 3D laser scanner. This technique converts the visually ambiguous 3D range information into a 2D map where natural features of a scene are highlighted. These features represent depth discontinuities and direction changes in the range image. We show that by enhancing the features the user can easily find the corresponding points of the camera image points. Therefore, visually identifying laser-camera correspondences becomes as easy as image pairing. Once point correspondences are given, extrinsic calibration is done using the well-known PnP algorithm followed b...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: IROS
• Authors: Davide Scaramuzza, Ahad Harati, Roland Siegwart
• Keywords: Ambiguous 3D Range, Extrinsic Calibration, IROS 2007, Point Correspondences, Robotics