Multi-Calib: A Scalable LiDAR–Camera Calibration Network for Variable Sensor Configurations

Traditional calibration methods rely on precise targets and frequent manual intervention, making them time-consuming and unsuitable for large-scale deployment. Existing learning-based approaches, while automating the process, are typically limited to single LiDAR-camera pairs, resulting in poor scalability and high computational overhead. To address these limitations, we propose a lightweight calibration network with flexibility in the number of sensor pairs, making it capable of jointly calibrating multiple cameras and LiDARs in a single forward pass. Our method employs a frozen pre-trained Swin Transformer as a shared backbone to extract unified features from both RGB images and corresponding depth maps. Additionally, we introduce a cross-modal channel-wise attention module to enhance key feature alignment and suppress irrelevant noise. Moreover, to handle variations in viewpoint, we design a modular calibration head that independently estimates the extrinsics for each LiDAR-camera pair. Through large-scale experiments on the nuScenes dataset, we show that our model, requiring merely 78.79 M parameters, attains a mean translation error of 2.651 cm and a rotation error of 0.246∘, achieving comparable performance to existing methods while significantly reducing the computational cost.

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Publication Details

Journal
Sensors
Published
2025-12-02
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/s25237321
Primary Topic
Robotics and Sensor-Based Localization
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

Multi-Calib: A Scalable LiDAR–Camera Calibration Network for Variable Sensor Configurations

Leyun Hu, Meijing Wang, Chao Wei, Z. Wu et al.
Sensors
Robotics and Sensor-Based Localization
article

Multi-Calib: A Scalable LiDAR–Camera Calibration Network for Variable Sensor Configurations

Leyun Hu, Meijing Wang, Chao Wei, Z. Wu, Xu Yang
article en

Abstract

Traditional calibration methods rely on precise targets and frequent manual intervention, making them time-consuming and unsuitable for large-scale deployment. Existing learning-based approaches, while automating the process, are typically limited to single LiDAR-camera pairs, resulting in poor scalability and high computational overhead. To address these limitations, we propose a lightweight calibration network with flexibility in the number of sensor pairs, making it capable of jointly calibrating multiple cameras and LiDARs in a single forward pass. Our method employs a frozen pre-trained Swin Transformer as a shared backbone to extract unified features from both RGB images and corresponding depth maps. Additionally, we introduce a cross-modal channel-wise attention module to enhance key feature alignment and suppress irrelevant noise. Moreover, to handle variations in viewpoint, we design a modular calibration head that independently estimates the extrinsics for each LiDAR-camera pair. Through large-scale experiments on the nuScenes dataset, we show that our model, requiring merely 78.79 M parameters, attains a mean translation error of 2.651 cm and a rotation error of 0.246∘, achieving comparable performance to existing methods while significantly reducing the computational cost.

SensorsVol. 25(23)
Beijing Institute of Technology (CN)
Openalex Percentile: Top 50%
Robotics and Sensor-Based Localization
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