Numerous roadside perception datasets have been introduced to propel advancements in autonomous driving and intelligent transportation systems research and development. However, it has been observed that the majority of their concentrates is on urban arterial roads, inadvertently overlooking residential areas such as parks and campuses that exhibit entirely distinct characteristics. In light of this gap, we propose CORP, which stands as the first public benchmark dataset tailored for multi-modal roadside perception tasks under campus scenarios. Collected in a university campus, CORP consists of over 205k images plus 102k point clouds captured from 18 cameras and 9 LiDAR sensors. These sensors with different configurations are mounted on roadside utility poles to provide diverse viewpoints within the campus region. The annotations of CORP encompass multi-dimensional information beyond 2D and 3D bounding boxes, providing extra support for 3D seamless tracking and instance segmentation with unique IDs and pixel masks for identifying targets, to enhance the understanding of objects and their behaviors distributed across the campus premises. Unlike other roadside datasets about urban traffic, CORP extends the spectrum to highlight the challenges for multi-modal perception in campuses and other residential areas.
The fusion of LiDARs and cameras has been increasingly adopted in autonomous driving for perception tasks. The performance of such fusion-based algorithms largely depends on the accuracy of sensor calibration, which is challenging due to the difficulty of identifying common features across different data modalities. Previously, many calibration methods involved specific targets and/or manual intervention, which has proven to be cumbersome and costly. Learning-based online calibration methods have been proposed, but their performance is barely satisfactory in most cases. These methods usually suffer from issues such as sparse feature maps, unreliable cross-modality association, inaccurate calibration parameter regression, etc. In this paper, to address these issues, we propose CalibFormer, an end-to-end network for automatic LiDAR-camera calibration. We aggregate multiple layers of camera and LiDAR image features to achieve high-resolution representations. A multi-head correlation module is utilized to identify correlations between features more accurately. Lastly, we employ transformer architectures to estimate accurate calibration parameters from the correlation information. Our method achieved a mean translation error of $0.8751 \mathrm{cm}$ and a mean rotation error of $0.0562 ^{\circ}$ on the KITTI dataset, surpassing existing state-of-the-art methods and demonstrating strong robustness, accuracy, and generalization capabilities.