Novel joint calibration method of camera and 3D laser range finder

A novel calibration method employing only a planar calibration board for joint calibration of a camera and a 3D laser range finder was proposed.The calibration process is composed of two successive steps,i.e.calibration of each sensor independently and joint calibration of both sensors later.Different from the traditional methods which find the solution by correspondence of key points or edges,the distance pairs between the sensors' original points and the target plane are adopted as the main cues of the calibration.By this,the problem of low accuracy when extracting key points or edges on the laser range images is avoided.Furthermore the whole calibration process can be implemented by using only one planar calibration board,which is simple and practical.Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve calibration results with higher precision than those of traditional methods.