The extrinsic calibration of area-scan camera and 2D Laser Rangefinder (LRF) Using checkerboard trihedron

Abstract

The combination of area-scan camera and 2D laser rangefinder (LRF) can capture both textural and geometrical information from a scene at the same time, and has been widely used in various fields. Due to the differences of the installation position and acquisition mode, calibrating the extrinsic parameters, including the rotation and translation, of two sensors is necessary for fusing the camera image and LRF data. In this paper, a simple and flexible extrinsic calibration method is proposed by only acquiring a checkerboard trihedron once. Using checkerboard trihedron as a mobile referenced control field, the proposed method includes three steps to calibrate the extrinsic parameters. First, the rotation and translation between the trihedron and LRF are solved with a simplified perspective-three-point (P3P) solution; Second, using the collinear equation of checkerboard corners and their pixels in the image, the camera is calibrated with respect to the trihedron; Third, combining the last two steps, the rotation and translation parameters between the camera and LRF are finally calibrated with the intermediate referenced trihedron. After a lot of simulation and real experiments, the proposed method has been demonstrated to have the advantages of simple operation, strong robustness and high accuracy in real experiment.