Panoramic Lenses for Machine Vision

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Using Panoramic Lenses for Machine Peripheral Vision

There are many situations where a machine or robot needs to be aware of its environment. A single or stereo camera system can only show as small subsection of the environment. This is where panoramic lenses become useful. For example, we have a picture taken of a small office.

This picture, taken using a PAL panoramic lens, gives a 360 degree view, 22.5 degrees above and below the horizon. For a human viewer it seem rather distorted, but a machine vision algorithm can process this image just as easyly as a the more regular "unwraped" image shown below.

You can also make QuickTime VR movies from panoramic pictures. Here is one created from a picture taken by the designer of this particular lens (Pal Greguss) in Budapest Hungary: