Extrinsic calibration of a camera and a 2D laser without overlap

• Calibrated the extrinsic parameters of camera–laser systems without overlap.
• Proposed two methods of calculating an initial solution.
• Proposed three different cost functions for non-linear optimization.
• Analyzed poses which must be considered while capturing data.
• Evaluated the accuracy of the proposed methods using both synthetic and real data.

This paper presents a practical means of extrinsic calibration between a camera and a 2D laser sensor, without overlap. In previous calibration methods, the sensors must be able to see a common geometric structure such as a plane or a line. In order to calibrate a non-overlapping camera–laser system, it is necessary to attach an extra sensor, such as a camera or a 3D laser sensor, whose relative poses from both the camera and the 2D laser sensor can be calculated. In this paper, we propose two means of calibrating a non-overlapping camera–laser system directly without an extra sensor. For each method, the initial solution of the relative pose between the camera and the 2D laser sensor is computed by adopting a reasonable assumption about geometric structures. This is then refined via non-linear optimization, even if the assumption is not met perfectly. Both simulation results and experiments using actual data show that the proposed methods provide reliable results compared to the ground truth, as well as similar or better results than those provided by conventional methods.