1D RangeFinder - Camera calibration

Extrinsic calibration for single point rangefinder (LiDAR altimeter) and monocular vision systems.

• The laser beam is supposed to be not visibile in the camera images (tested with 900 nm laser and camera with infrared filter).
• The laser is supposed to hit a planar target with a checkerboard pattern attached. See examples.
• Required are N>5 pairs of images and range values.
• It is returned the oriented segment (of unit length) that represent the center of the range finder+ direction w.r.t the camera optical frame.

Usage

Just run the main.m script in the matlab/ folder. There are multiple ways to try the code out:

• use the test images and range scans provided in the folders images/ and scans/ (camera parameters are cached in a .mat file, which can be loaded by setting the variable in line 16)
• uncomment lines 34-40 in main.m to generate a randomized synthetic dataset

References

If you find this code useful for your projects/research, please cite the corresponding papers:

• Giubilato, R. et al. "MiniVO: Minimalistic Range Enhanced Monocular System for Scale Correct Pose Estimation", IEEE Sensors Journal, 2020
• Giubilato, R. et al. "Scale Correct Monocular Visual Odometry Using a LiDAR Altimeter", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2018

@ARTICLE{giubilato2020minivo, 
    author={R. {Giubilato} and S. {Chiodini} and M. {Pertile} and S. {Debei}}, 
    journal={IEEE Sensors Journal}, 
    title={MiniVO: Minimalistic Range Enhanced Monocular System for Scale Correct Pose Estimation}, 
    year={2020}, 
    doi={10.1109/JSEN.2020.2978334}, 
    ISSN={2379-9153},
}

@INPROCEEDINGS{giubilato2018scale, 
    author={R. {Giubilato} and S. {Chiodini} and M. {Pertile} and S. {Debei}}, 
    booktitle={2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)}, 
    title={Scale Correct Monocular Visual Odometry Using a LiDAR Altimeter}, 
    year={2018}, 
    pages={3694-3700}, 
    doi={10.1109/IROS.2018.8594096}, 
    ISSN={2153-0858}, 
    month={Oct},
}

Compatibility

Tested with Matlab 2018b. Earlier versions might be incompatible with plot/legend functions.