AprilTag array-aided extrinsic calibration of camera–laser multi-sensor system

Abstract

This paper presents a new algorithm for extrinsically calibrating a multi-sensor system including multiple cameras and a 2D laser scanner. On the basis of the camera pose estimation using AprilTag, we design an AprilTag array as the calibration target and employ a nonlinear optimization to calculate the single-camera extrinsic parameters when multiple tags are in the field of view of the camera. The extrinsic parameters of camera–camera and laser–camera are then calibrated, respectively. A global optimization is finally used to refine all the extrinsic parameters by minimizing a re-projection error. This algorithm is adapted to the extrinsic calibration of multiple cameras even if there is non-over-lapping field of view. For algorithm validation, we have built a micro-aerial vehicle platform with multi-sensor system to collect real data, and the experiment results confirmed that the proposed algorithm yields great performance.