Extrinsic Calibration of a Camera and Laser Range Finder

We describes theoretical and experimental results for the extrinsic calibration of sensor platform consisting of a camera and a laser range finder. The proposed technique requires the system to observe a planar pattern in several poses, and the constraints are based upon data captured simultaneously from the camera and the laser range finder. The planar pattern surface and the laser scanline on the planar pattern are related, so these data constrain the relative position and orientation of the camera and laser range finder. The calibration procedure starts with a closed-from solution,which provides initial conditions for a subsequent nonlinear refinement. We present the results from both computer simulated data and an implementation on a B21r Mobile Robot from iRobot Corporation, using a Sony firewire digital camera and SICK PLS laser scanner.