A Novel Calibration Board and Experiments for 3D LiDAR and Camera Calibration

Aiming at the problems of feature point calibration method of 3D light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and camera calibration that are calibration boards in various forms, incomplete information extraction methods and large calibration errors, a novel calibration board with local gradient depth information and main plane square corner information (BWDC) was designed. In addition, the "three-step fitting interpolation method" was proposed to select feature points and obtain the corresponding coordinates of feature points in the LiDAR coordinate system and camera pixel coordinate system based on BWDC. Finally, calibration experiments were carried out, and the calibration results were verified by methods such as incremental verification and reprojection error comparison. The calibration results show that using BWDC and the "three-step fitting interpolation method" can solve quite accurate coordinate transformation matrix and intrinsic and external parameters of sensors, which dynamically change within 0.2% in the repeatable experiments. The difference between the experimental value and the actual value in the incremental verification experiment is about 0.5%. The average reprojection error is 1.8312 pixels, and the value changes at different distances do not exceed 0.1 pixels, which also show that the calibration method is accurate and stable.