Odometry-based online extrinsic sensor calibration

In recent years vehicles have been equipped with more and more sensors for environment perception. Among these sensors are cameras, RADAR, single-layer and multi-layer LiDAR. One key challenge for the fusion of these sensors is sensor calibration. In this paper we present a novel extrinsic calibration algorithm based on sensor odometry. Given the time-synchronized delta poses of two sensors our technique recursively estimates the relative pose between these sensors. The method is generic in that it can be used to estimate complete 6DOF poses, given the sensors provide a 6DOF odometry, as well as 3DOF poses (planar offset and yaw angle) for sensors providing a 3DOF odometry, like a single-beam LiDAR. We show that the proposed method is robust against motion degeneracy and present results on both simulated and real world data using an inertial navigation system (INS) and a stereo camera system.