Catadioptric omnidirectional camera

• Published in: Proceedings of IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition pp. 482 - 488
• Main Author: Nayar, S.K.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 1997
• Subjects: Cameras; Computer science; Image sensors; Layout; Mirrors; Navigation; Software prototyping; Spatial resolution; Surveillance; Yagi-Uda antennas
• ISBN: 9780818678226; 0818678224
• ISSN: 1063-6919; 1063-6919
• DOI: 10.1109/CVPR.1997.609369

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.