Remission based improvement of extrinsic parameter calibration of camera and laser scanner

This paper presents an improvement for an automatic extrinsic parameter calculation between a monocular camera and single line laser range finder. The focus of this work is a further reduction of calibration errors compared to other existing methods, and the unique and automatic identification and detection of a calibration object under usage of the remission measurements of the laser scanner data. The use of the remission measurements leads to a reduction of the edge effect, which leads to error measurements at the edges of a measured object, if distance measurements are used exclusively. Further, the usage of the remission measurements enables the unique identification of a new calibration object with a significant remission signature. The result is an automatic extrinsic parameter calculation which works reliably with a high accuracy. The performance of the proposed method was verified in simulation and experiments. In order to classify the results of simulation and experiments, they were compared to other existing methods.