CaLiV: LiDAR-to-Vehicle Calibration of Arbitrary Sensor Setups via Object Reconstruction

Abstract: In autonomous systems, sensor calibration is essential for a safe and efficient navigation in dynamic environments. Accurate calibration is a prerequisite for reliable perception and planning tasks such as object detection and obstacle avoidance. Many existing LiDAR calibration methods require overlapping fields of view, while others use external sensing devices or postulate a feature-rich environment. In addition, Sensor-to-Vehicle calibration is not supported by the vast majority of calibration algorithms. In this work, we propose a novel target-based technique for extrinsic Sensor-to-Sensor and Sensor-to-Vehicle calibration of multi-LiDAR systems called CaLiV. This algorithm works for non-overlapping FoVs, as well as arbitrary calibration targets, and does not require any external sensing devices. First, we apply motion to produce FoV overlaps and utilize a simple unscented Kalman filter to obtain vehicle poses. Then, we use the Gaussian mixture model-based registration framework GMMCalib to align the point clouds in a common calibration frame. Finally, we reduce the task of recovering the sensor extrinsics to a minimization problem. We show that both translational and rotational Sensor-to-Sensor errors can be solved accurately by our method. In addition, all Sensor-to-Vehicle rotation angles can also be calibrated with high accuracy. We validate the simulation results in real-world experiments. The code is open source and available on https://github.com/TUMFTM/CaLiV.