Automatic camera and range sensor calibration using a single shot

Abstract

As a core robotic and vision problem, camera and range sensor calibration have been researched intensely over the last decades. However, robotic research efforts still often get heavily delayed by the requirement of setting up a calibrated system consisting of multiple cameras and range measurement units. With regard to removing this burden, we present a toolbox with web interface for fully automatic camera-to-camera and camera-to-range calibration. Our system is easy to setup and recovers intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters as well as the transformation between cameras and range sensors within one minute. In contrast to existing calibration approaches, which often require user intervention, the proposed method is robust to varying imaging conditions, fully automatic, and easy to use since a single image and range scan proves sufficient for most calibration scenarios. Experimentally, we demonstrate that the proposed checkerboard corner detector significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art. Furthermore, the proposed camera-to-range registration method is able to discover multiple solutions in the case of ambiguities. Experiments using a variety of sensors such as grayscale and color cameras, the Kinect 3D sensor and the Velodyne HDL-64 laser scanner show the robustness of our method in different indoor and outdoor settings and under various lighting conditions.