Compound catadioptric stereo sensor for omnidirectional object detection

This paper describes a novel system for detecting objects close to our sensor. For real time detection and portability, we have developed a small sensor with compound spherical mirrors. Since an object is projected onto each mirror, our method computes the range by a catadioptric stereo method. Our method creates a lookup table of corresponding points for an infinite range. If an object is close enough to the sensor, the projected points of the object are different from these corresponding points. Thus, our method can detect near objects by taking the differences in intensity of the corresponding points between the images in the mirrors. We show the experimental setup of our sensor and the result for detecting near objects.