A novel method for the extrinsic calibration of a 2D laser rangefinder and a camera

We present a novel method for extrinsically calibrating a camera and a 2D laser rangefinder whose beams are invisible from the camera image. We show that the point-to-plane constraints from a single observation of a V-shaped calibration pattern composed of two non-coplanar triangles suffice to uniquely constrain the relative pose between two sensors. Next, we present an approach to obtain analytical solutions using point-to-plane constraints from single or multiple observations. Along the way, we also show that the previous solutions, in contrast to our method, have inherent ambiguities and therefore must rely on a good initial estimate. Real and synthetic experiments validate our method and show that it achieves better accuracy than the previous methods.