Motional Ad LLC

Paul Aurel Diederichs

Maurilio Di Cicco

Jun Shern Chan

Andreas Jianhao Aumiller

Francisco Alejandro Suarez Ruiz

An automatic calibration and validation pipeline is disclosed to estimate and evaluate the accuracy of extrinsic parameters of a camera-to-LiDAR coordinate transformation. In an embodiment, an automated and unsupervised calibration procedure is employed where the computed rotational and translational parameters ('extrinsic parameters') of the camera-to-LiDAR coordinate transformation are automatically estimated and validated, and upper bounds on the accuracy of the extrinsic parameters are set. The calibration procedure combines three-dimensional (3D) plane, vector and point correspondences to determine the extrinsic parameters, and the resulting coordinate transformation is validated by analyzing the projection of a filtered point cloud including a validation target in the image space. A single camera image and LiDAR scan (a “single shot”) are used to calibrate and validate the extrinsic parameters. In addition to only requiring a single shot, the complete procedure solely relies on one or more planar calibration targets and simple geometrical validation targets.

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Graefelfing, Germany

Paul Aurel Diederichs