The Research of Direct Calibration of Camera and Laser Range Finder

Laser range finder and camera have different abilities to capture external information, and combining these abilities of the two can greatly improve the environment perception ability of Autonomous Land Vehicle. This paper realized direct calibration of camera and Laser Range Finder on the vehicle based on the research of extrinsic calibration technique. This paper took the chessboard calibration plate as the intermediary, and according to the laser data obtained on the vehicle, presented a direct calibration method with the restriction that the laser data is vertical to the calibration plate normal. Also, Simulated Annealing method, which can effectively overcome the local minimum problem in calibration matrix optimization, was adopted on the initial results to optimize the calibration precision. Experiment results show that this method is robust and reliable, and can get more accurate calibration results which also meet the requirements of perception accuracy in Autonomous Land Vehicle environment.