A combined calibration of 2D and 3D sensors a novel calibration for laser triangulation sensors based on point correspondences

In this paper we describe a 2D/3D vision sensor, which consists of a laser triangulation sensor and matrix colour camera. The outcome of this sensor is the fusion of the 3D data delivered from the laser triangulation sensor and the colour information of the matrix camera in the form of a coloured point cloud. For this reason a novel calibration method for the laser triangulation sensor was developed, which makes it possible to use one common calibration object for both cameras and provides their relative spatial position. A sensor system with a SICK Ranger E55 profile scanner and a DALSA Genie color camera was set up to test the calibration in terms of the quality of the match between the color information and the 3D point cloud.