Target-free extrinsic calibration of a mobile multi-beam lidar system

LIDAR sensors are widely used in mobile mapping systems. With the recent developments, the sensors provide high amounts of data, which are necessary for some applications that require a high level of detail. Multi-beam LIDAR sensors can provide this level of detail, but need a specific calibration routine to provide the best precision possible. Because they have many beams, the calibration of such sensors is difficult and is not well represented in the literature. We present an automatic method for the optimization of the calibration parameters of a multi-beam LIDAR sensor: the proposed approach does not need any calibration target, and only uses information from the acquired point clouds, which makes it simple to use. For our optimization method, we define an energy function which penalizes points far from local planar surfaces. At the end of the automatic process, we are able to give the precision of the calibration parameters found.