An extrinsic calibration method for binocular cameras and swing 2D laser rangefinder

In this paper a novel method is proposed to calibrate the extrinsic parameters of the swing 2D laser rangefinder (LRF) and binocular cameras system. Target object that need special processing is abandoned. Extrinsic calibration is completed with one observation of three planes that posted with checkboard-like posters. The procedure is simplified. Superior to the monocular vision, stereo vision can obtain more information of scene. 3D virtual points and lines are deduced by analyzing the intersected 3D planes and they are used as inputs to an optimization problem which estimating the relative pose between camera and LRF. Moreover, we build geometric model of swing LRF and estimate the two important parameters with Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) individually. Thus, the distortion of point cloud that caused by mechanical structure is corrected as pretreatment of relative pose calculation. Experimental results demonstrate the validity of the proposed calibration and correction methods.