High-Precision Multicamera-Assisted Camera-IMU Calibration: Theory and Method
- 14 January 2021
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement
- Vol. 70 (00189456), 1-17
- https://doi.org/10.1109/tim.2021.3051726
Abstract
This paper presents a high precision single-camera IMU extrinsic calibration method by tightly fusing the visual information from other cameras. Specifically, multiple additional cameras are added to the monocular camera-IMU system for assisting calibration as we theoretically prove that more cameras used in calibration can lead to smaller lower bound on the covariance of the estimated extrinsic parameters, which then results in better calibration accuracy. Moreover, we provide two degenerative motion conditions in the resulting multi-camera visual-inertial system, which impair the calibration accuracy and should be avoided in real application whenever possible. More importantly, we present the requirement of minimum motion for a reliable extrinsic calibration to provide the practical guideline. Finally, the full validation on both simulation and real world data are demonstrated. By evaluating the Cramér-rao Lower Bound on the covariance, the proposed camera-IMU calibration method is shown to be statistically efficient for accurate calibration with errors less than 0.01m in translation and 0.5° in rotation, which is consistent with the theoretical analysis in paper.Keywords
Funding Information
- National Key Research and Development Program of China (2019YFB1309503)
- National Nature Science Foundation of China (61903332)
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