Modeling and Calibration of Inertial and Vision Sensors

This paper is concerned with the problem of estimating the relative translation and orientation of an inertial measurement unit and a camera, which are rigidly connected. The key is to realize that this problem is in fact an instance of a standard problem within the area of system identification, referred to as a gray-box problem. We propose a new algorithm for estimating the relative translation and orientation, which does not require any additional hardware, except a piece of paper with a checkerboard pattern on it. The method is based on a physical model which can also be used in solving for example sensor fusion problems. The experimental results show that the method works well in practice, both for perspective and spherical cameras.