An Efficient Solution for Extrinsic Calibration of a Vision System with Simple Laser

Increasing demands for accurate reconstruction of the non-cooperative target are arising recent years. The existing methods which combine cameras and laser range finders (LRF) are inconvenient and costly. A new vision system is proposed that the widely used laser range finder is replaced with a simple laser. The combination of a camera and a simple calibrated laser is also highly accurately enough to reconstruct the three-dimensional position of the laser spot, while the cost much less than LRF. Also, a method to calibrate the extrinsic parameters between a camera and a simple laser is proposed. First, the direction and the position of the simple laser under the coordinate system of the camera are attained, and the extrinsic parameters of the camera and laser system are gotten using the calibration algorithm. Then how to use it to reconstruct a laser spot's three-dimensional position is displayed. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the proposed method is comparable to the state-of-the-art LRF-based methods.