Motion-based extrinsic sensor-to-sensor calibration: Effect of reference frame selection for new and existing methods

This paper studies the effect of reference frame selection in sensor-to-sensor extrinsic calibration when formulated as a motion-based hand-eye calibration problem. Different reference selection options are tested under varying noise conditions in simulation, and the findings are validated with real data from the KITTI dataset. We propose two nonlinear cost functions for optimization and compare them with four state-of-the-art methods. One of the proposed cost functions incorporates outlier rejection to improve calibration performance and was shown to significantly improve performance in the presence of outliers, and either match or outperform the other algorithms in other noise conditions. However, the performance gain from reference frame selection was deemed larger than that from algorithm selection. In addition, we show that with realistic noise, the reference frame selection method commonly used in literature is inferior to other tested options, and that relative error metrics are not reliable for telling which method achieves best calibration performance.