Implementation of spherical mirror based panoramic vision

Omnidirectional camera is able to obtain 360 degree images of surrounding environment directly, These images contain the abundant information. And this equipment has no any revolver. It is a new scientific research focus of vision techniques. This technology has widely applied prospects in scientific research, community service, industry and military field. In order to get a widely visual scope, curved surface mirror are usually adopted as image collector. Especially the spherical and the hyperbolic mirror are in common. But the observed images were severely distorted (warping). For analyzing and explaining the images correctly, resumption for reconstruction of distorted visual images has to be done. This paper presents the implementation of an omnidirectional camera combining spherical mirror with regular lens. And there are some comparisons of the spherical mirror with the hyperbolic one. The hyperboloid imaged by a standard perspective camera does have a single viewpoint (SVP). But the spheroid imaged by a perspective camera does not have a single viewpoint. This paper settles this drawback by showing how to construct approximately correct single viewpoints in spherical system. This construction is called to be the iso-angle method. Using a mathematical method for approximating a single viewpoint and an iso-angle mapping, a SVP device can be constructed under these conditions. This paper also introduces the principle and structure of omnidirectional camera. In particular, the algorithm of omnidirectional image warping and the experimental results are also discussed.