A single-lens trinocular stereovision system using a 3F filter

This paper describes a passive trinocular stereovision system which employs only one real camera and a 3F filter. The image captured by this system can be divided into three sub-images which can be taken as the images captured by three virtual cameras. Two different approaches used to understand this system are presented: one is based on camera calibration technique and another is based on geometrical analysis on ray sketching. The later approach provides an interesting way of understanding this system as it does not require complex camera calibration but one field point test process would be enough to determine this system if pin-hole camera model is used to simulate the virtual cameras, which greatly saves the effort of system determination and implementation. Experiments are conducted to test the feasibilities of both approaches.