This paper proposes an automated method to obtain the extrinsic calibration parameters between a camera and a 3D lidar with as low as 16 beams. We use a checkerboard as a reference to obtain features of interest in both sensor frames. The calibration board centre point and normal vector are automatically extracted from the lidar point cloud by exploiting the geometry of the board. The corresponding features in the camera image are obtained from the camera's extrinsic matrix. We explain the reasons behind selecting these features, and why they are more robust compared to other possibilities. To obtain the optimal extrinsic parameters, we choose a genetic algorithm to address the highly non-linear state space. The process is automated after defining the bounds of the 3D experimental region relative to the lidar, and the true board dimensions. In addition, the camera is assumed to be intrinsically calibrated. Our method requires a minimum of 3 checkerboard poses, and the calibration accuracy is demonstrated by evaluating our algorithm using real world and simulated features.
More recently in @cite_19 , points corresponding to the edges of the checkerboard were used to fit lines. The corresponding edge lines were obtained from the camera and constraints were formed using plane-line correspondence. As explained in the previous section, these features are more prone to errors and hence we avoid using them.
@cite_19
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In this paper, we address the problem of extrinsic calibration of a camera and a 3D Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensor using a checkerboard. Unlike previous works which require at least three checkerboard poses, our algorithm reduces the minimal number of poses to one by combining 3D line and plane correspondences. Besides, we prove that parallel planar targets with parallel boundaries provide the same constraints in our algorithm. This allows us to place the checkerboard close to the LiDAR so that the laser points better approximate the target boundary without loss of generality. Moreover, we present an algorithm to estimate the similarity transformation between the LiDAR and the camera for the applications where only the correspondences between laser points and pixels are concerned. Using a similarity transformation can simplify the calibration process since the physical size of the checkerboard is not needed. Meanwhile, estimating the scale can yield a more accurate result due to the inevitable measurement errors of the checkerboard size and the LiDAR intrinsic scale factor that transforms the LiDAR measurement to the metric measurement. Our algorithm is validated through simulations and experiments. Compared to the plane-only algorithms, our algorithm can obtain more accurate result by fewer number of poses. This is beneficial to the large-scale commercial application. This paper addresses the problem of estimating the motion of a camera as it observes the outline (or apparent contour) of a solid bounded by a smooth surface in successive image frames. In this context, the surface points that project onto the outline of an object depend on the viewpoint and the only true correspondences between two outlines of the same object are the projections of frontier points where the viewing rays intersect in the tangent plane of the surface. In turn, the epipolar geometry is easily estimated once these correspondences have been identified. Given the apparent contours detected in an image sequence, a robust procedure based on RANSAC and a voting strategy is proposed to simultaneously estimate the camera configurations and a consistent set of frontier point projections by enforcing the redundancy of multiview epipolar geometry. The proposed approach is, in principle, applicable to orthographic, weak-perspective, and affine projection models. Experiments with nine real image sequences are presented for the orthographic projection case, including a quantitative comparison with the ground-truth data for the six data sets for which the latter information is available. Sample visual hulls have been computed from all image sequences for qualitative evaluation. We address the problem of camera motion and 3D structure reconstruction from line correspondences across multiple views, from initialization to final bundle adjustment. One of the main difficulties when dealing with line features is their algebraic representation. First, we consider the triangulation problem. Based on Plucker coordinates to represent the 3D lines, we propose a maximum likelihood algorithm, relying on linearizing the Plucker constraint and on a Plucker correction procedure, computing the closest Plucker coordinates to a given 6-vector. Second, we consider the bundle adjustment problem, which is essentially a nonlinear optimization process on camera motion and 3D line parameters. Previous overparameterizations of 3D lines induce gauge freedoms and or internal consistency constraints. We propose the orthonormal representation, which allows handy nonlinear optimization of 3D lines using the minimum four parameters with an unconstrained optimization engine. We compare our algorithms to existing ones on simulated and real data. Results show that our triangulation algorithm outperforms standard linear and bias-corrected quasi-linear algorithms, and that bundle adjustment using our orthonormal representation yields results similar to the standard maximum likelihood trifocal tensor algorithm, while being usable for any number of views. The determination of camera position and orientation from known correspondences of 3D reference points and their images is known as pose estimation in computer vision and space resection in photogrammetry. It is well-known that from three corresponding points there are at most four algebraic solutions. Less appears to be known about the cases of four and five corresponding points. We propose a family of linear methods that yield a unique solution to 4- and 5-point pose determination for generic reference points. We first review the 3-point algebraic method. Then we present our two-step, 4-point and one-step, 5-point linear algorithms. The 5-point method can also be extended to handle more than five points. Finally, we demonstrate our methods on both simulated and real images. We show that they do not degenerate for coplanar configurations and even outperform the special linear algorithm for coplanar configurations in practice.