Single-camera panoramic stereo imaging system with a fisheye lens and a convex mirror

This paper presents a panoramic stereo imaging system which uses a single camera coaxially combined with a fisheye lens and a convex mirror. It provides the design methodology, trade analysis, and experimental results using commercially available components. The trade study shows the design equations and the various tradeoffs that must be made during design. The system's novelty is that it provides stereo vision over a full 360-degree horizontal field-of-view (FOV). Meanwhile, the entire vertical FOV is enlarged compared to the existing systems. The system is calibrated with a computational model that can accommodate the non-single viewpoint imaging cases to conduct 3D reconstruction in Euclidean space. (c) 2011 Optical Society of America