A Simple Calibration Procedure for a 2D LiDAR With Respect to a Camera

This paper proposes a simple calibration procedure for a planar scanning laser rangefinder or a 2D LiDAR with respect to a regular monocular camera, in which a point-like target is utilized to obtain point-to-point correspondences, which can make the calibration problem simple. In the proposed method, a small spherical object is attached to a rod, which is hand-held, and the correspondences are simply and effectively acquired by setting the target in front of the sensors and repeatedly moving the target downward by hand, until the LiDAR captures the target. We also describe possible noise present in the proposed data acquisition process, followed by simulation and real experiment. The simulation study examines the performance of the proposed calibration in the presence of noise, in which the LiDAR parameter estimation is successful unless the noise is excessive. In the real experiment, the proposed calibration is conducted by constructing a real calibration system, where we evaluate the reprojection error of the proposed calibration. In both simulation and experiment, a conventional calibration procedure with a v-shaped board target is also conducted for evaluating the proposed calibration procedure. It is confirmed that the proposed method is more effective in point cloud acquisition and calibration performance.