An OmniView (omnidirectional) camera has a field of view of 360 degrees. As humans, we have a field of view smaller than 180 degrees. Imagine being able to see what's happening behind your back at the same time that you are looking forward? Wouldn't that be useful! That's what CSEM's OminView camera does : it has a field of view of 360 degrees in the horizontal plane and -60 to +10 degrees in the vertical plane. In addition it can see in stereovision using two OmniView cameras that are stacked vertically. The overlapping images are used to calculate the distance to identified objects. If you look at the image below you can see that horizontal features in the panoramic scene appear circular and vertical features as radial stripes moving from the centre of the image to the outside edge. 
Raw sensor data recorded with omniview camera system (left:upper camera/right:lower camera)  Unprocessed unrolled panorama images created from raw data
This technology is highly experimental and produces some very interesting results as you can see from the pictures above. The top picture shows the image as it falls on the sensor, whilst the bottom image shows the same image after it has been 'straightened out' by the PRoVisG software. |