A high-precision calibration technique for laser measurement instrument and stereo vision sensors

To realize successful 3D reconstruction of cultural relics, urban scenes or the creation of VR, the use of both laser measurement instrument (LMI) and vision data in a same framework has proved to be a powerful technique. A necessary condition to fuse these kinds of data is to accurately calibrate the LMI and photographic sensors. The proposed method is based on observing a planar checkerboard pattern and solving for the constraints between views of the pattern from cameras and LMI We start with a closed-form solution that minimizes the algebraic error from this constraint, which provides as the initial conditions for the subsequent nonlinear refinement with Lavenberg-Marquardt algorithm. The high-precision calibration results of both computer simulated data and experimental data are given.