CalibSwitch: Observation-Driven Camera-LiDAR Extrinsic Recovery and Selective Maintenance for Multimodal Perception
Haifa Zhang, Yijing Wang, Zhiqiang Zuo
Abstract
Camera--LiDAR perception on mobile robots and intelligent vehicles depends on reliable sensor geometry throughout deployment. Installation variations create uncertainty in the initial extrinsics, while changing observation quality makes frame-wise estimates fluctuate during operation. This paper presents CalibSwitch, an observation-driven framework that separates absolute extrinsic recovery from selective state maintenance. A cross-modal absolute extrinsic generator (CAEG) combines projection-free bidirectional feature interaction with geometry-regularized learning to recover complete SE(3) candidates from image--point observations and coarse view context, without a supplied numerical initial transform. A selective recurrent calibration policy (SRCP) combines observation quality and temporal history to determine when a candidate should replace the working geometry consumed by a frozen multimodal detector. On nuScenes, CAEG achieves mean translation and rotation errors of 0.248 m and 5.884$^\circ$. Under sustained geometric transitions, SRCP reaches a mean composite error of 1.46 with 9.70\% candidate commitments, outperforming quality-based and temporal-consistency gating at comparable commitment rates. Relative to unconditional per-frame updating, it improves frozen-detector mAP and NDS by 1.43 and 0.92 points. Paired geometry--observation uncertainty tests, two real-vehicle platforms, and 13.5-FPS single-camera Jetson execution demonstrate the system value of selective geometric-state maintenance for continuous perception.