OmniVIL-Calib: Target-Free Joint Calibration for Omnidirectional Camera, IMU, and LiDAR

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Authors: Yihan Tu, Ruidong Mei, Hui Cheng
Cited by: 0
References: 22

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