Extrinsic calibration of the 2D laser rangefinder and binocular cameras system base on virtual points

In this paper a novel method is proposed to calibrate the extrinsic parameters of the laser rangefinder (LRF) and binocular cameras system. Currently, many calibration methods based on 2D laser rangefinder and signal camera have been investigated by extracting observable feature points in images and point clouds matching to calculate the relative translation and rotation between the coordinate frames. Superior to the monocular vision, stereo vision can obtain more information of scene, such as 3D planes. In this paper, virtual points and lines are deduced by analyzing the intersected 3D planes and they are used as inputs to an optimization problem which requires jointly estimating the relative translation and rotation between left camera and LRF. Moreover, two parameters for LRF geometric model can also be estimated. The proposed method only need range data of LRF and scan once of scene. It is suitable for various types of LRF. Experimental results demonstrate the validity of the proposed method.