Stereoscopic wide field of view imaging system

Abstract

A stereoscopic imaging system incorporates a plurality of imaging devices or cameras to generate a high resolution, wide field of view image database from which images can be combined in real time to provide wide field of view or panoramic or omni-directional still or video images.

Description

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS [0001] This application claims the benefit under 35 U.S.C. § 119(e) of U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 60 / 594,429, filed Apr. 7, 2005, and U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 60 / 594,430, filed Apr. 7, 2005, the disclosures of both of which are incorporated by reference herein.STATEMENT REGARDING FEDERALLY SPONSORED RESEARCH OR DEVELOPMENT [0002] This invention was made under NASA Contract Nos. NNJ04JC50C and NNJ05JE77C. The government has certain rights in this invention.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0003] The concept of stitching multiple camera images together in order to compose a wide field of view image is known, as is the concept of capturing multiple video signals to compose a panoramic or omni-directional image, with some stereographic functionality. See, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,703,604, 6,323,858, 6,356,397, 6,392,699, and 7,015,954 and US Patent Application No. 2003 / 0117488. [0004] There are three general techniques ...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0011] The present invention relates to a stereoscopic imaging system incorporating a plurality of imaging devices or cameras. The system generates a high resolution, wide field of view image database from which images can be combined to provide wide field of view or panoramic or omni-directional images. Wide field of view or panoramic images include any combination of images to increase the width of the scene. A panoramic view can extend a full 360°, in which the combined images form a full circle in a plane. Images can also be combined so that the wide field of view or panoramic view extends upwardly or downwardly from a plane. An omni-directional image extends a full 4π steradians.

[0014] The image processing operations can be implemented using a variety of processing techniques, from a computer's central processor, digital signal processors, field programmable devices such as FPGAs, or application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), leading to efficient and rapid processing.

Problems solved by technology

First, the speed of image capture is limited by the rotational speed of the servo-mechanism and inertia of the assembly.

This can place significant performance limits on the frame-rate and shutter-rate of the system as well as the speed with which users can scan the surroundings.

Second, reliance on moving elements for operation inherently possesses greater maintenance requirements and suspect reliability.

Third, multiple users of such a system are constrained to view the same part of the scene simultaneously, since only one direction can be viewed at a time.

However, while this approach may be affordable and relatively prevalent, it also suffers from a number of significant drawbacks.

Because the entire scene is being captured by a single CCD (or similar image capture element), the total average information per pixel is significant, causing resolution loss.

More importantly, however, because this technique generally involves projecting a spherical surface onto a flat, rectangular image capture element (e.g. the CCD or CMOS chip), significant distortion is unavoidable, negatively impacting resolution.

Some amount of distortion can be processed out, but the information lost due to this inefficient image capture mechanism cannot be retrieved.

Also, with the widespread use of digital imagers (digital cameras, camera phones, etc.) the cost of CCD & CMOS imaging components is rapidly decreasing, increasing the affordability of this approach.

The main drawback in using this approach is the requirement it places on processing bandwidth.

If significant real-time video processing is also required, the bandwidth demands increase.

Most of these devices do not make use of more than 11 cameras and, thus, resolution suffers.

In addition, to cover the same area with fewer cameras requires wide field of view lenses, causing distortion-induced resolution loss, as described above in connection with the use of fish-eye lenses for panoramic image capture.

Obscuration is an issue in most of these prior designs when it comes to stereo capture.

In particular, some of the camera systems are only able to grab stereo images by placing two of their omni-directional imagers adjacent to each other.

Using such a set-up to capture panoramic wide field of view scenes is problematic as there is no easy way to remove the obscuration that each imager would create when viewing laterally.

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