OmniVIL-Calib: Target-Free Joint Calibration for Omnidirectional Camera, IMU, and LiDAR
Abstract
Accurate spatiotemporal calibration is crucial for effective data fusion in Visual-Inertial-LiDAR (VIL) systems. However, it remains challenging for setups involving omnidirectional cameras due to their ultra-wide Field-of-View (FoV) and severe distortion. Existing methods often rely on calibration targets or lack native support for such configurations. This letter presentsOmniVIL-Calib, a target-free framework for the joint spatiotemporal calibration of an omnidirectional camera, IMU, and LiDAR. We propose an omnidirectional motion-flow model that generalizes the mapping-free paradigm to handle the non-linear geometric distortions inherent in ultra-wide FoV cameras and introduce a robust spherical cross-modal association to align visual and LiDAR edges. These constraints are jointly optimized to estimate all extrinsic parameters simultaneously. Validated on our self-collectedOmniVILdataset, the proposed approach achieves an average accuracy of 0.82 cm in translation and 0.13$^{\circ }$in rotation. Experimental results show that our method achieves accuracy comparable to target-based benchmarks and exhibits superior performance compared to existing target-free solutions. To facilitate further research, theOmniVILdataset and the source code are available athttps://github.com/EthanTwo2022/omniVIL_Calib.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Robotics and Sensor-Based Localization
3D Surveying and Cultural Heritage
Inertial Sensor and Navigation
Publication details
- Journal / source
- IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
- Volume
- 11
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 4187–4194
- Publication date
- 9 February 2026
- Language
- EN