A Novel Method for Extrinsic Calibration of a 2-D Laser-Rangefinder and a Camera

We present a novel solution for extrinsically calibrating a camera and a Laser Rangefinder (LRF) by computing the transformation between the camera frame and the LRF frame. Our method is applicable for LRFs which measure only a single plane. It does not rely on observing the laser plane in the camera image. Instead, we show that point-to-plane constraints from a single observation of a V-shaped calibration pattern composed of two non-coplanar triangles suffice to uniquely constrain the transformation. Next, we present a method to obtain a solution using point-to-plane constraints from single or multiple observations. Along the way, we also show that previous solutions, in contrast to our method, have inherent ambiguities and therefore must rely on a good initial estimate. Real and synthetic experiments validate our method and show that it achieves better accuracy than previous methods.