Online Targetless End-to-End Camera-LIDAR Self-calibration

Abstract

In this paper we propose an end-to-end, automatic, online camera-LIDAR calibration approach, for application in self driving vehicle navigation. The main idea is to connect the image domain and the 3D space by generating point clouds from camera data while driving, using a structure from motion (SfM) pipeline, and use it as the basis for registration. As a core step of the algorithm we introduce an object level alignment to transform the generated and captured point clouds into a common coordinate system. Finally, we calculate the correspondences between the 2D image domain and the 3D LIDAR point clouds, to produce the registration. We evaluated the method in various different real life traffic scenarios.