Niko's Project Corner

Rendering omnidirectional images

As I men­tioned in the pre­vi­ous ar­ti­cle about om­ni­di­rec­tional cam­eras, my Mas­ters of Sci­ence The­sis in­volved the us­age of this spe­cial kind of imag­ing sys­tem which con­sists of a tra­di­tional cam­era lens and a con­cave mir­ror, which pro­vided 360° × 90° Field of View. It was or­dered from Japan and there was some de­lay in the de­liv­ery, so mean­while I wrote an all-Mat­lab script to sim­ulate this sys­tem's prop­er­ties, cal­ibra­tion and panorama gen­er­ation in prac­tice.

Omnidirectional cameras

My Mas­ters of Sci­ence The­sis in­volved the us­age of a so-called "om­ni­di­rec­tional cam­era". There are vari­ous ways of achiev­ing 180° or even 360° view, with their dis­tinct pros and cons. The gen­eral ben­efit of these al­ter­na­tive cam­era sys­tems is that ob­jects don't need to be tracked, be­cause gen­er­ally they stay with­ing the ex­tremely broad Field of View (FoV) of the cam­era. This is also very ben­efi­cial in vi­sual odom­etry tasks, be­cause land­marks can be tracked for longer pe­ri­ods of time.