Global calibration method for a multi-sensor measurement system based on structured light stereo vision

The global calibration of multi-sensor measurement system is difficult to accomplish, usually, it needs external high-precision measurement equipment. A novel global calibration method based on common planar template is proposed. Stereo vision combined with laser linear-structured light is adopted to constitute a 3D vision sensor system (3DVSS). Stereo calibration of the 3DVSS can be finished by the planar template calibration method. For the global calibration of multiple vision sensors, it only needs a common planar template which is one of the planar templates can be seen synchronously by every camera in 3DVSS. The homography matrix between the coordinate systems of the 3DVSS and the common planer template can be calculated. The global coordinate is established in the common planar template, so the local coordinate system (LCS) of each 3DVSS can be transformed to the global coordinate system (GCS) through the common planar template. Two experiments have been used to test the proposed method, and the experimental results show that the proposed method is flexible and effective.