A Joint Extrinsic Calibration Tool for Radar, Camera and Lidar

We address joint extrinsic calibration of lidar, camera and radar sensors. To simplify calibration, we propose a single calibration target design for all three modalities, and implement our approach in an open-source tool with bindings to Robot Operating System (ROS). Our tool features three optimiz...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on intelligent vehicles 2021-09, Vol.6 (3), p.571-582
Main Authors: Domhof, Joris, Kooij, Julian F. P., Gavrila, Dariu M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Annotations
Calibration
camera
Cameras
Configurations
intelligent vehicles
Laser radar
Lidar
Markers
Optimization
Probabilistic models
radar
Robot sensing systems
Robot vision systems
Robots
ROS
Sensors
Source code
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Description
Summary:We address joint extrinsic calibration of lidar, camera and radar sensors. To simplify calibration, we propose a single calibration target design for all three modalities, and implement our approach in an open-source tool with bindings to Robot Operating System (ROS). Our tool features three optimization configurations, namely using error terms for a minimal number of sensor pairs, or using terms for all sensor pairs in combination with loop closure constraints, or by adding terms for structure estimation in a probabilistic model. Apart from relative calibration where relative transformations between sensors are computed, our work also addresses absolute calibration that includes calibration with respect to the mobile robot's body. Two methods are compared to estimate the body reference frame using an external laser scanner, one based on markers and the other based on manual annotation of the laser scan. In the experiments, we evaluate the three configurations for relative calibration . Our results show that using terms for all sensor pairs is most robust, especially for lidar to radar, when minimum five board locations are used. For absolute calibration   the median rotation error around the vertical axis reduces from 1^\circ before calibration, to 0.33^\circ using the markers and 0.02^\circ with manual annotations.
ISSN:2379-8858
2379-8904
DOI:10.1109/TIV.2021.3065208