Cameras and Inertial/Magnetic Sensor Units Alignment Calibration

Due to the external acceleration interference/magnetic disturbance, the inertial/magnetic measurements are usually fused with visual data for drift-free orientation estimation, which plays an important role in a wide variety of applications, ranging from virtual reality, robot, and computer vision to biomotion analysis and navigation. However, in order to perform data fusion, alignment calibration must be performed in advance to determine the difference between the sensor coordinate system and the camera coordinate system. Since orientation estimation performance of the inertial/magnetic sensor unit is immune to the selection of the inertial/magnetic sensor frame original point, we therefore ignore the translational difference by assuming the sensor and camera coordinate systems sharing the same original point and focus on the rotational alignment difference only in this paper. By exploiting the intrinsic restrictions among the coordinate transformations, the rotational alignment calibration problem is formulated by a simplified hand–eye equation
$AX=XB$
(
$A$
,
$X$
, and
$B$
are all rotation matrices). A two-step iterative algorithm is then proposed to solve such simplified hand-eye calibration task. Detailed laboratory validation has been performed and the good experimental results have illustrated the effectiveness of the proposed alignment calibration method.