Development of a stereo omnidirectional imaging system (SOS)

We proposed a stereo omnidirectional imaging system, named SOS. The system can take all directional views and depth maps from an observation point, in real-time, by using a component constructed of sixty cameras. The cameras are separated into twenty stereo vision units. Each unit is composed of three cameras that are arranged horizontally and vertically. These units are arranged on each face of a regular icosahedron and each stereo vision unit is arranged so that it does not obstruct the view of other units. As a result, we succeeded in reducing the size of the entire sensor, securing the base line length to generate the depth value with enough precision to allow the simultaneous acquisition of the color images and depth maps omnidirectionally in three dimensions. In this paper the characteristics of our proposed system and an example image acquired from the system are then shown