Lasers to Events: Automatic Extrinsic Calibration of Lidars and Event Cameras

Despite significant academic and corporate efforts, autonomous driving under adverse visual conditions still proves challenging. As neuromorphic technology has matured, its application to robotics and autonomous vehicle systems has become an area of active research. Low-light and latency-demanding situations can benefit. To enable event cameras to operate alongside staple sensors like lidar in perception tasks, we propose a direct, temporally-decoupled calibration method between event cameras and lidars. The high dynamic range and low-light operation of event cameras are exploited to directly register lidar laser returns, allowing information-based correlation methods to optimize for the 6-DoF extrinsic calibration between the two sensors. This paper presents the first direct calibration method between event cameras and lidars, removing dependencies on frame-based camera intermediaries and/or highly-accurate hand measurements. Code will be made publicly available.