Automatic Extrinsic Calibration of Thermal Camera and LiDAR for Vehicle Sensor Setups

LiDAR is one of the most used sensors in many areas like robotics, self-driving cars, and advanced driving assistance systems due to providing an accurate point cloud of the surroundings. However, to cope with challenges in perceiving the environment around a vehicle, LiDAR data is often combined with data from other sensors. Thermal cameras can provide complementary information that can be beneficial, especially for detecting pedestrians and seeing at nighttime and in fog, dust, etc. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for the extrinsic calibration of a thermal camera and a LiDAR sensor in a vehicle. First, one or more thermal image-point cloud pairs of our designed calibration target are collected. Then line and plane equations of the target’s edges and plane in both data modalities are found. Finally, the algorithm uses lines and plane correspondences to cross-calibrate the sensors. The proposed method obtains good results with one or more poses. We also show that it works well with sparse LiDAR data. Several experiments are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the method.