A High-Resolution Panoramic Camera

Wide field of view (FOV) and high resolution are two desirable properties in many vision-based applications such as tele-conferencing, surveillance, and robot navigation. In some applications such as 3 0 reconstruction and rendering, it is also desired that all viewing directions share a single viewpoint, the entire FOV be imaged simultaneously, in real-time, and the depth offield be large. In this paper, we review such a panoramic camera proposed by NaIwa in 1996 that uses reflections off planar mirrors to achieve the jirst four of the uforementioned capabilities. He uses a single mirror pyramid ( S W ) and a number ofcameras that point to the individual pyramid faces. Together the cameras yield a visual ,field having a width of 360 degrees and a height same as that of the individual cameras. We propose a double mirror-pyramid (DMP) design that still achieves a 360-degree FO V horizontally but doubles the vertical FOV. It retains the other three capabilities namely high resolution, a single apparent viewpoint across the entire FOV, and real-time panoramic capture. We speciJL the visua1,field mapping @om the scene to the sensor realized by the proposed camera. Finally, an implementation of the proposed DMP design is described and examples of preliminary panoramic images obtained are included.