A Prism Based Single-Lens Multi-Ocular Stereo lmage Capture System

This paper introduces one passive prism based single-lens multi-ocular stereo image capture system. It only employs one real CCD camera with a pyramid-like multi-face glass prism. Each image captured by this system can be divided into three, four or more sub-images which can be taken as the images simultaneously captured by a group of virtual cameras generated by the prism. Hence this system can be further categorized into trinocular, quadric-ocular, penta-ocular and other multi-ocular sub-systems depending on the number of virtual cameras. Two different approaches are developed to understand this system such that the stereo information embedded in each image can be recovered: one approach is based on camera calibration technique and another is based on geometrical analysis on ray sketching. Experiments are conducted to test the feasibilities of the both approaches