Panoramic Lens Applications Revisited

During the last few years, innovative optical design strategies to generate and control image mapping have been successful in producing high-resolution digital imagers and projectors. This new generation of panoramic lenses includes catadioptric panoramic lenses, panoramic annular lenses, visible/IR fisheye lenses, anamorphic wide-angle attachments, and visible/IR panomorph lenses. Given that a wide-angle lens images a large field of view on a limited number of pixels, a systematic pixel-to-angle mapping will help the efficient use of each pixel in the field of view. In this paper, we present several modern applications of these modern types of hemispheric lenses. Recently, surveillance and security applications have been proposed and published in Security and Defence symposium. However, modern hemispheric lens can be used in many other fields. A panoramic imaging sensor contributes most to the perception of the world. Panoramic lenses are now ready to be deployed in many optical solutions. Covered applications include, but are not limited to medical imaging (endoscope, rigiscope, fiberscope...), remote sensing (pipe inspection, crime scene investigation, archeology...), multimedia (hemispheric projector, panoramic image...). Modern panoramic technologies allow simple and efficient digital image processing and the use of standard image analysis features (motion estimation, segmentation, object tracking, pattern recognition) in the complete 360o hemispheric area.