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 extrinsic parameter



L2M-Calib: One-key Calibration Method for LiDAR and Multiple Magnetic Sensors

Lyu, Qiyang, Wang, Wei, Wu, Zhenyu, Shen, Hongming, Zhou, Huiqin, Wang, Danwei

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Multimodal sensor fusion enables robust environmental perception by leveraging complementary information from heterogeneous sensing modalities. However, accurate calibration is a critical prerequisite for effective fusion. This paper proposes a novel one-key calibration framework named L2M-Calib for a fused magnetic-LiDAR system, jointly estimating the extrinsic transformation between the two kinds of sensors and the intrinsic distortion parameters of the magnetic sensors. Magnetic sensors capture ambient magnetic field (AMF) patterns, which are invariant to geometry, texture, illumination, and weather, making them suitable for challenging environments. Nonetheless, the integration of magnetic sensing into multimodal systems remains underexplored due to the absence of effective calibration techniques. To address this, we optimize extrinsic parameters using an iterative Gauss-Newton scheme, coupled with the intrinsic calibration as a weighted ridge-regularized total least squares (w-RRTLS) problem, ensuring robustness against measurement noise and ill-conditioned data. Extensive evaluations on both simulated datasets and real-world experiments, including AGV-mounted sensor configurations, demonstrate that our method achieves high calibration accuracy and robustness under various environmental and operational conditions.


Online IMU-odometer Calibration using GNSS Measurements for Autonomous Ground Vehicle Localization

Song, Baoshan, Xia, Xiao, Yan, Penggao, Zhong, Yihan, Wen, Weisong, Hsu, Li-Ta

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract--Accurate calibration of intrinsic (odometer scaling factors) and extrinsic parameters (IMU-odometer translation and rotation) is essential for autonomous ground vehicle localization. Existing GNSS-aided approaches often rely on positioning results or raw measurements without ambiguity resolution, and their observability properties remain underexplored. This paper proposes a tightly coupled online calibration method that fuses IMU, odometer, and raw GNSS measurements (pseudo-range, carrier-phase, and Doppler) within an extendable factor graph optimization (FGO) framework, incorporating outlier mitigation and ambiguity resolution. Observability analysis reveals that two horizontal translation and three rotation parameters are observable under general motion, while vertical translation remains unobservable. Simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate superior calibration and localization performance over state-of-the-art loosely coupled methods. Specifically, the IMU-odometer positioning using our calibrated parameters achieves the absolute maximum error of 17.75 m while the one of LC method is 61.51 m, achieving up to 71.14% improvement. T o foster further research, we also release the first open-source dataset that combines IMU, 2D odometer, and raw GNSS measurements from both rover and base stations. T o support future work, we release the first open-source dataset combining IMU, 2D odometer, and raw GNSS measurements from rover and base stations. Localization for autonomous ground vehicles: Localization is a fundamental requirement for AGV, supporting intelligent transportation applications such as delivery, patrolling, search, and rescue [1]. An IMU and an odometer are two common sensors to provide acceleration, velocity and angular velocity for navigation [2]. Generally, they are less susceptible to environmental changes and can be used as dead-reckoning sensors which can incorporate other external sensors (e.g., camera [3], light detection and ranging (LiDAR) [4] and GNSS [5]) to achieve driftless positioning. The problem is, these external sensors are sensitive to environmental conditions.



Temporal and Rotational Calibration for Event-Centric Multi-Sensor Systems

Mai, Jiayao, Lu, Xiuyuan, Dai, Kuan, Shen, Shaojie, Zhou, Yi

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Event cameras generate asynchronous signals in response to pixel-level brightness changes, offering a sensing paradigm with theoretically microsecond-scale latency that can significantly enhance the performance of multi-sensor systems. Extrinsic calibration is a critical prerequisite for effective sensor fusion; however, the configuration that involves event cameras remains an understudied topic. In this paper, we propose a motion-based temporal and rotational calibration framework tailored for event-centric multi-sensor systems, eliminating the need for dedicated calibration targets. Our method uses as input the rotational motion estimates obtained from event cameras and other heterogeneous sensors, respectively. Different from conventional approaches that rely on event-to-frame conversion, our method efficiently estimates angular velocity from normal flow observations, which are derived from the spatio-temporal profile of event data. The overall calibration pipeline adopts a two-step approach: it first initializes the temporal offset and rotational extrinsics by exploiting kinematic correlations in the spirit of Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA), and then refines both temporal and rotational parameters through a joint non-linear optimization using a continuous-time parametrization in SO(3). Extensive evaluations on both publicly available and self-collected datasets validate that the proposed method achieves calibration accuracy comparable to target-based methods, while exhibiting superior stability over purely CCA-based methods, and highlighting its precision, robustness and flexibility. To facilitate future research, our implementation will be made open-source. Code: https://github.com/NAIL-HNU/EvMultiCalib.


L2Calib: $SE(3)$-Manifold Reinforcement Learning for Robust Extrinsic Calibration with Degenerate Motion Resilience

Li, Baorun, Zhu, Chengrui, Du, Siyi, Chen, Bingran, Ren, Jie, Wang, Wenfei, Liu, Yong, Lv, Jiajun

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

-- Extrinsic calibration is essential for multi-sensor fusion, existing methods rely on structured targets or fully-excited data, limiting real-world applicability. Online calibration further suffers from weak excitation, leading to unreliable estimates. T o address these limitations, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based extrinsic calibration framework that formulates extrinsic calibration as a decision-making problem, directly optimizes SE (3) extrinsics to enhance odometry accuracy. Our approach leverages a probabilistic Bingham distribution to model 3D rotations, ensuring stable optimization while inherently retaining quaternion symmetry. A trajectory alignment reward mechanism enables robust calibration without structured targets by quantitatively evaluating estimated tightly-coupled trajectory against a reference trajectory. Additionally, an automated data selection module filters uninformative samples, significantly improving efficiency and scalability for large-scale datasets. Extensive experiments on UA Vs, UGVs, and handheld platforms demonstrate that our method outperforms traditional optimization-based approaches, achieving high-precision calibration even under weak excitation conditions. The code is available at https://github.com/


FAST-Calib: LiDAR-Camera Extrinsic Calibration in One Second

Zheng, Chunran, Zhang, Fu

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper proposes FAST-Calib, a fast and user-friendly LiDAR-camera extrinsic calibration tool based on a custom-made 3D target. FAST-Calib supports both mechanical and solid-state LiDARs by leveraging an efficient and reliable edge extraction algorithm that is agnostic to LiDAR scan patterns. It also compensates for edge dilation artifacts caused by LiDAR spot spread through ellipse fitting, and supports joint optimization across multiple scenes. We validate FAST-Calib on three LiDAR models (Ouster, Avia, and Mid360), each paired with a wide-angle camera. Experimental results demonstrate superior accuracy and robustness compared to existing methods. With point-to-point registration errors consistently below 6.5mm and total processing time under 0.7s, FAST-Calib provides an efficient, accurate, and target-based automatic calibration pipeline. We have open-sourced our code and dataset on GitHub to benefit the robotics community.


Joint Optimization-based Targetless Extrinsic Calibration for Multiple LiDARs and GNSS-Aided INS of Ground Vehicles

Wang, Junhui, Qiao, Yan, Gao, Chao, Wu, Naiqi

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Accurate extrinsic calibration between multiple LiDAR sensors and a GNSS-aided inertial navigation system (GINS) is essential for achieving reliable sensor fusion in intelligent mining environments. Such calibration enables vehicle-road collaboration by aligning perception data from vehicle-mounted sensors to a unified global reference frame. However, existing methods often depend on artificial targets, overlapping fields of view, or precise trajectory estimation, which are assumptions that may not hold in practice. Moreover, the planar motion of mining vehicles leads to observability issues that degrade calibration performance. This paper presents a targetless extrinsic calibration method that aligns multiple onboard LiDAR sensors to the GINS coordinate system without requiring overlapping sensor views or external targets. The proposed approach introduces an observation model based on the known installation height of the GINS unit to constrain unobservable calibration parameters under planar motion. A joint optimization framework is developed to refine both the extrinsic parameters and GINS trajectory by integrating multiple constraints derived from geometric correspondences and motion consistency. The proposed method is applicable to heterogeneous LiDAR configurations, including both mechanical and solid-state sensors. Extensive experiments on simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate the accuracy, robustness, and practical applicability of the approach under diverse sensor setups.


Improvement on LiDAR-Camera Calibration Using Square Targets

Li, Zhongyuan, Gou, Honggang, Li, Ping, Guo, Jiaotong, Ye, Mao

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

-- Precise sensor calibration is critical for autonomous vehicles as a prerequisite for perception algorithms to function properly. Rotation error of one degree can translate to position error of meters in target object detection at large distance, leading to improper reaction of the system or even safety related issues. Many methods for multi-sensor calibration have been proposed. However, there are very few work that comprehensively consider the challenges of the calibration procedure when applied to factory manufacturing pipeline or after-sales service scenarios. In this work, we introduce a fully automatic LiDAR-camera extrinsic calibration algorithm based on targets that is fast, easy to deploy and robust to sensor noises such as missing data. The core of the method include: (1) an automatic multi-stage LiDAR board detection pipeline using only geometry information with no specific material requirement; (2) a fast coarse extrinsic parameter search mechanism that is robust to initial extrinsic errors; (3) a direct optimization algorithm that is robust to sensor noises. We validate the effectiveness of our methods through experiments on data captured in real world scenarios.


Observability-Aware Active Calibration of Multi-Sensor Extrinsics for Ground Robots via Online Trajectory Optimization

Wang, Jiang, Kang, Yaozhong, Fu, Linya, Nakadai, Kazuhiro, Kong, He

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

--Accurate calibration of sensor extrinsic parameters for ground robotic systems (i.e., relative poses) is crucial for ensuring spatial alignment and achieving high-performance perception. However, existing calibration methods typically require complex and often human-operated processes to collect data. Moreover, most frameworks neglect acoustic sensors, thereby limiting the associated systems' auditory perception capabilities. T o alleviate these issues, we propose an observability-aware active calibration method for ground robots with multimodal sensors, including a microphone array, a LiDAR (exteroceptive sensors), and wheel encoders (proprioceptive sensors). Unlike traditional approaches, our method enables active trajectory optimization for online data collection and calibration, contributing to the development of more intelligent robotic systems. Specifically, we leverage the Fisher information matrix (FIM) to quantify parameter observability and adopt its minimum eigenvalue as an optimization metric for trajectory generation via B-spline curves. Through planning and replanning of robot trajectory online, the method enhances the observability of multi-sensor extrinsic parameters. The effectiveness and advantages of our method have been demonstrated through numerical simulations and real-world experiments. Precise calibration of extrinsic parameters of robotic systems, namely, the relative positions and orientations between sensors, is essential for achieving accurate spatial alignments and effective multimodal sensor fusion [1]-[4]. Moreover, sensor parameters inevitably drift over time due to factors such as environmental noises and system vibrations. Jiang Wang's work was also supported by the JST BOOST program under Grant No. JPMJBS2430. Jiang Wang and Y aozhong Kang contributed equally to this work.