Choosing a time and place for calibration of lidar-camera systems

Abstract

We propose a calibration method that automatically estimates the extrinsic calibration between a sensor pose-graph from natural scenes. The sensor pose-graph represents a system of sensors comprising of lidars and cameras, without sensor co-visibility constraints. The method addresses the fact that each scene contributes differently to the calibration problem by introducing a diligent scene selection scheme. The algorithm searches over all scenes to extract a subset of exemplars, whose joint optimisation yields progressively better calibration estimates. This non-parametric method requires no knowledge of the physical world, and continuously finds scenes that better constrain the optimisation parameters. We explain the theory, implement the method, and provide detailed performance analyses with experiments on real-world data.