Motorized Panoramic Camera Mount – Calibration and Image Capture

Panoramic cameras have become popular because they provide impressive and immerse experience of the scene and allow several interesting applications. Among the large variation of panoramic camera systems, we have focused on concentric panoramic imaging with a frame camera. In order to establish the concentric image acquisition, the camera mount must be calibrated so that the projection centre of the camera is located at the rotation centre of the mount. For this purpose, we developed a novel mount calibration method, which allows an accurate recovery of the rotation centre in two image acquisition steps. In addition, we have built a motorized camera mount that can self-calibrate the camera position within the mount, given the previously solved rotation centre, and then be used to automatically capture panoramic images. Hence, we have streamlined the previously laborious manual phase of iterative position calibration, but also automated the capturing of panoramic images. For validation purposes, reference results from a conventional manual mount are provided. In the case of non-motorized mount, the average distance between the projection centre of the camera and the rotation centre of the mount was 0.253 mm and the standard deviation was 0.161 mm. For the motorized mount, the corresponding average distance and standard deviation were 0.549 mm and 0.404 mm, respectively.