Automatic LiDAR-Camera Calibration of Extrinsic Parameters Using a Spherical Target

Abstract

This paper investigates a novel calibration process of devices with different modalities, which is a critical step of computer vision applications. We propose a fully automatic extrinsic calibration of a LiDAR-camera system. Our approach applies sphere as their surfaces and contours can be accurately detected on point clouds and camera images, respectively. Experiments on synthetic and real data exhibit that our automatic algorithm is fast and robust and it yields accurate camera and LiDAR extrinsic parameters.