Perception

Camera Extrinsics

Camera extrinsics are the rigid-body transform, a rotation and translation forming an SE(3) pose, that relates the camera's coordinate frame to an external reference frame such as a robot base, end-effector, or world origin. Together with intrinsics, extrinsics allow 3D points to be projected into the image and pixels to be back-projected into workspace coordinates. Extrinsics are estimated via hand-eye calibration or fiducial markers and must be re-verified after any camera remounting.

Why it matters for physical AI

Multi-view policies and 3D scene representations require accurate extrinsics to fuse observations; a few degrees of extrinsic error can move a predicted grasp point by centimeters, causing hard-to-diagnose policy failures.