Robust accurate extrinsic calibration of static non-overlapping cameras

Abstract

An increasing number of robots and autonomous vehicles are equipped with multiple cameras to achieve surround-view sensing. The estimation of their relative poses, also known as extrinsic parameter calibration, is a challenging problem, particularly in the non-overlapping case. We present a simple and novel extrinsic calibration method based on standard components that performs favorably to existing approaches. We further propose a framework for predicting the performance of different calibration configurations and intuitive error metrics. This makes selecting a good camera configuration straightforward. We evaluate on rendered synthetic images and show good results as measured by angular and absolute pose differences, as well as the reprojection error distributions.