LiDAR-Camera Calibration using 3D-3D Point correspondences

Ankit Dhall, Kunal Chelani, Vishnu Radhakrishnan, KM Krishna

Did you find this package useful and would like to contribute? :smile:
See how you can contribute and make this package better for future users. Go to Contributing section. :hugs:

ROS package to calibrate a camera and a LiDAR.

The package is used to calibrate a LiDAR (config to support Hesai and Velodyne hardware) with a camera (works for both monocular and stereo).

The package finds a rotation and translation that transform all the points in the LiDAR frame to the (monocular) camera frame. Please see Usage for a video tutorial. The lidar_camera_calibration/pointcloud_fusion provides a script to fuse point clouds obtained from two stereo cameras. Both of which were extrinsically calibrated using a LiDAR and lidar_camera_calibration. We show the accuracy of the proposed pipeline by fusing point clouds, with near perfection, from multiple cameras kept in various positions. See Fusion using lidar_camera_calibration for results of the point cloud fusion (videos).

For more details please refer to our paper.

Citing lidar_camera_calibration

Please cite our work if lidar_camera_calibration and our approach helps your research.

@article{2017arXiv170509785D,
   author = {{Dhall}, A. and {Chelani}, K. and {Radhakrishnan}, V. and {Krishna}, K.~M.
    },
    title = "{LiDAR-Camera Calibration using 3D-3D Point correspondences}",
  journal = {ArXiv e-prints},
archivePrefix = "arXiv",
   eprint = {1705.09785},
 primaryClass = "cs.RO",
 keywords = {Computer Science - Robotics, Computer Science - Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition},
     year = 2017,
    month = may
}

Contents

1. Setup and Installation :hammer_and_wrench:
2. Contributing :hugs:
3. Getting Started :zap:
4. Usage :beginner:
5. Results and point cloud fusion using lidar_camera_calibration :checkered_flag:

Setup and Installation

Please follow the installation instructions for your Ubuntu Distrubtion here on the Wiki

Contributing

As an open-source project, your contributions matter! If you would like to contribute and improve this project consider submitting a pull request. That way future users can find this package useful just like you did. Here is a non-exhaustive list of features that can be a good starting point:

• Iterative process with weighted average over multiple runs
• Passing Workflows for Kinetic, Melodic and Noetic
• Hesai and Velodyne LiDAR options (see Getting Started)
• Integrate LiDAR hardware from other manufacturers
• Automate process of marking line-segments
• Github Workflow with functional test on dummy data
• Support for upcoming Linux Distros
• Support for running the package in ROS2
• Tests to improve the quality of the project

Getting Started

There are a couple of configuration files that need to be specfied in order to calibrate the camera and the LiDAR. The config files are available in the lidar_camera_calibration/conf directory. The find_transform.launch file is available in the lidar_camera_calibration/launch directory.

config_file.txt

1280 720
-2.5 2.5
-4.0 4.0
0.0 2.5
0.05
2
0
611.651245 0.0 642.388357 0.0
0.0 688.443726 365.971718 0.0
0.0 0.0 1.0 0.0
1.57 -1.57 0.0
0

The file contains specifications about the following:

image_width image_height
x- x+
y- y+
z- z+
cloud_intensity_threshold
number_of_markers
use_camera_info_topic?

File truncated at 100 lines see the full file