An Accurate and Stable Extrinsic Calibration for a Camera and a 1D Laser Range Finder

Due to low cost and ease of manufacture, the combined sensor consisted of a camera and a 1D laser range finder is commonly used in many engineering applications. Especially in aerospace field, this type of combined sensor is important to earth observation and deep space exploration. This article proposes a novel extrinsic calibration method to get the accurate and stable calibration results of camera-1D laser range finder combined sensor. Firstly, an accuracy criterion named with directional comprehensive criterion is proposed to solve the less constraint in traditional calibration methods, which can evaluate the inconsistencies in the 1D laser ranging direction and the mean reprojection error in the 2D image plane direction fully. Then, according to the proposed directional comprehensive criterion, a novel robust extrinsic calibration framework is presented, which removes the observation data with large errors automatically and utilizes a stability criterion as the termination condition. The simulation experiments and real data experiments reveal that the proposed method is effective, which is superior to the existing methods.