Simplified Cross-Modal Calibration for Heterogeneous Event-RGB Stereo Systems

Abstract

Accurate extrinsic calibration between event-based and frame-based cameras remains a practical bottleneck for heterogeneous stereo systems. Existing approaches often require sensor or target motion, precise synchronization, or computationally expensive event-to-image reconstruction. We propose a simple, motion-free cross-modal calibration framework that uses a temporally modulated, blended ChArUco target presented on standard consumer displays. By alternating between the original pattern and a partially blended version, the target reliably triggers events while remaining continuously observable to a frame-based camera, avoiding blank frames and reducing synchronization constraints to a coarse, trigger-based alignment. We discretize events into frames coarsely aligned with the RGB images, apply lightweight denoising, and perform ChArUco-based intrinsic and stereo extrinsic calibration. Extensive experiments assess robustness to blending opacity, display brightness, external illumination, viewing angle, and handheld acquisition. Compared to the strongest motion-based reference (E2Calib + Kalibr) and a non-motion-based reference (Plasberg et al.), our approach reduces the mean reprojection error by $44\%$ and $6\%$, respectively, while substantially simplifying the calibration procedure. Finally, we demonstrate practical utility in a robotic eye-to-hand calibration case study, showing consistent transformations and stable downstream geometric measurements even under partial occlusions. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/nhessenthaler/simple-evrgb-cal.