Calibration of RGB camera with velodyne LiDAR

Calibration of the LiDAR sensor with RGB camera finds its usage in many application fields from enhancing image classification to the environment perception and mapping. This paper presents a pipeline for mutual pose and orientation estimation of the mentioned sensors using a coarse to fine approach. Previously published methods use multiple views of a known chessboard marker for computing the calibration parameters, or they are limited to the calibration of the sensors with a small mutual displacement only. Our approach presents a novel 3D marker for coarse calibration which can be robustly detected in both the camera image and the LiDAR scan. It also requires only a single pair of camera-LiDAR frames for estimating large sensors displacement. Consequent refinement step searches for more accurate calibration in small subspace of calibration parameters. The paper also presents a novel way for evaluation of the calibration precision using projection error.

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