Target-based calibration of 3D LiDAR and binocular camera on unmanned vehicles

Abstract

Unmanned vehicles need to gather the surrounding information comprehensively. Perception of automotive information is one of the important information. In the field of automotive perception, the stereo vision plays a vital role and stere-vision can calculate the length, width, and height, making the object more specific. However, under the existing technology, it is impossible to obtain accurate detection in a complex environment by relying on a single sensor. Therefore, it is particularly important to study the calibration technology based on multi-sensor fusion. This paper proposes a method based on feature point pair matching. Two rectangular planks are used to extract the 3D point cloud of the edge of the board in stereo vision and LiDAR coordinate systems, which is then used to obtain the corner coordinates. Finally, the Kabsch algorithm is used to solve the coordinate transformation between the paired feature points, and a clustering method is used to remove outliers from the multiple measurements and obtain the average value. By setting up an experiment, this method can be implemented on the Nvidia Jetson Tx2 embedded development board, and accurate registration parameters can be obtained, thus verifying the theoretical method’s feasibility. It finishes calibration of the LiDAR and binocular camera based on present methods. The result shows that, it can reduce the effects of noise, and acquire registration parameters accurately of LiDAR and cameras. Compared with the approved method of the same type, our proposed method has less errors and good practical value.