Targetless Calibration of a Lidar - Perspective Camera Pair

A novel method is proposed for the calibration of a camera - 3D lidar pair without the use of any special calibration pattern or point correspondences. The proposed method has no specific assumption about the data source: plain depth information is expected from the lidar scan and a simple perspective camera is used for the 2D images. The calibration is solved as a 2D-3D registration problem using a minimum of one (for extrinsic) or two (for intrinsic-extrinsic) planar regions visible in both cameras. The registration is then traced back to the solution of a non-linear system of equations which directly provides the calibration parameters between the bases of the two sensors. The method has been tested on a large set of synthetic lidar-camera image pairs as well as on real data acquired in outdoor environment.