KFCalibNet: A KansFormer-Based Self-Calibration Network for Camera and LiDAR

In autonomous driving and robotic navigation, multi-sensor fusion technology has become increasingly mainstream, with precise sensor calibration as its foundation. Traditional calibration methods rely on manual effort or specific targets, limiting adaptability to complex environments. Learning-based calibration methods still face challenges, such as insufficient overlap between the fields of view (FoV) of multiple sensors and suboptimal cross-modal feature association, which hinder accurate parameter regression. Unlike traditional CNN-based networks, we propose a KansFormer-based self-Calibration Network for camera and LiDAR (KFCalibNet) that replaces fixed activation functions and linear transformations with learnable nonlinear activation functions. This enables the extraction of more fine-grained features from both image and point cloud, significantly enhancing the network's robustness in scenarios with limited FoV overlap. We also employ a multihead attention (MHA) module to compute correlations between image and point cloud features, significantly enhancing cross-modal feature association. To reduce learning complexity, we designed KansFormer with FastKAN as the feedforward network, enabling deep fusion and regression of fine-grained cross-modal features for accurate extrinsic calibration. KFCalibNet achieves an absolute average calibration error of 0.0965 cm in translation and 0.0234° in rotation on the KITTI Odometry dataset, outperforming existing state-of-the-art calibration methods. Moreover, its accuracy and generalization capability have been validated across multiple real-world railway lines.