1997 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'97)
Catadioptric Omnidirectional Camera
Puerto Rico
June 17-June 19
ISBN: 0-8186-7822-4
Conventional video cameras have limited fields of view that make them restrictive in a variety of vision applications. There are several ways to enhance the field of view of an imaging system. However, the entire imaging system must have a single effective viewpoint to enable the generation of pure perspective images from a sensed image. A new camera with a hemispherical field of view is presented. Two such cameras can be placed back-to-back, without violating the single viewpoint constraint, to arrive at a truly omnidirectional sensor. Results are presented on the software generation of pure perspective images from an omnidirectional image, given any user-selected viewing direction and magnification. The paper concludes with a discussion on the spatial resolution of the proposed camera.