LIDAR to Camera Calibration Algorithm
We propose a new method for extrinsic calibration of a line-scan LIDAR with a perspective projection camera. Our method is a closed-form, minimal solution to the problem. The solution is a symbolic template found via variable elimination and the multi-polynomial Macaulay resultant. It does not require initialization, and can be used in an automatic calibration setting when paired with RANSAC and least-squares refinement.
This method can be used to calibrate a camera with a Hokuyo LIDAR.
This is done by solving the minimal problem of computing relative pose (rotation and translation) from six 3D point to plane correspondences.
Abstract
O. Naroditsky, A. Patterson, K. Daniilidis, Automatic Alignment of a Camera with a Line Scan LIDAR System, IEEE Int. Conf. Robotics and Automation, 2011 [pdf]
Paper
MATLAB code to compute the camera to LIDAR pose, given six LIDAR point to image line correspondences. Image lines are given as normals of the plane through the line and the camera origin. -- [download]
MATLAB code to polish the inliers points in the least squares sense, given the initial guess produced by RANSAC with above code as a hypothesis generator. -- [download]
Code
