Mutual Calibration of a Camera and a Laser Rangefinder

We present a novel geometrical method for mutually calibrating a camera and a laser rangefinder by exploiting the image of the laser dot in relation to the rangefinder reading. Our method simultaneously estimates all intrinsic parameters of a pinhole natural camera, its position and orientation w.r.t. the rangefinder axis, and four parameters of a very generic rangefinder model with one rotational degree of freedom. The calibration technique uses data from at least 5 different rangefinder rotations: for each rotation, at least 3 different observations of the laser dot and the respective rangefinder reading are needed. Data collection is simply performed by generically moving the rangefinder-camera system, and does not require any calibration target, nor any knowledge of environment or motion. We investigate the theoretical limits of the technique as well as its practical application; we also show extensions to using more data than strictly necessary or exploit a priori knowledge of some parameters.