Extrinsic Calibration of Multiple RGB-D Cameras From Line Observations

Abstract

This letter presents a novel method to estimate the relative poses between RGB and depth cameras without the requirement of an overlapping field of view, thus providing flexibility to calibrate a variety of sensor configurations. This calibration problem is relevant to robotic applications that can benefit of using several cameras to increase the field of view. In our approach, we extract and match lines of the scene in the RGB and depth cameras, and impose geometric constraints to find the relative poses between the sensors. An analysis of the observability properties of the problem is presented. We have validated our method in both synthetic and real scenarios with different camera configurations, demonstrating that our approach achieves good accuracy and is very simple to apply, in contrast with previous methods based on trajectory matching using visual odometry or simultaneous localization and mapping.