V2I-Calib: A Novel Calibration Approach for Collaborative Vehicle and Infrastructure LiDAR Systems

Abstract: Cooperative LiDAR systems integrating vehicles and road infrastructure, termed V2I calibration, exhibit substantial potential, yet their deployment encounters numerous challenges. A pivotal aspect of ensuring data accuracy and consistency across such systems involves the calibration of LiDAR units across heterogeneous vehicular and infrastructural endpoints. This necessitates the development of calibration methods that are both real-time and robust, particularly those that can ensure robust performance in urban canyon scenarios without relying on initial positioning values. Accordingly, this paper introduces a novel approach to V2I calibration, leveraging spatial association information among perceived objects. Central to this method is the innovative Overall Intersection over Union (oIoU) metric, which quantifies the correlation between targets identified by vehicle and infrastructure systems, thereby facilitating the real-time monitoring of calibration results. Our approach involves identifying common targets within the perception results of vehicle and infrastructure LiDAR systems through the construction of an affinity matrix. These common targets then form the basis for the calculation and optimization of extrinsic parameters. Comparative and ablation studies conducted using the DAIR-V2X dataset substantiate the superiority of our approach. For further insights and resources, our project repository is accessible at https://github.com/MassimoQu/v2i-calib.