A Centralized Omnidirectional Multi-Camera System with Peripherally-Guided Active Vision and Depth Perception

The growing popularity of omnidirectional vision technology has spawned numerous multi-camera designs that integrate various different camera types. This paper presents an omnidirectional vision system that combines a catadioptric camera, a fisheye camera and an active perspective camera. Aligning these cameras vertically provides a number of beneficial features, such as allowing simple peripherally-guided active vision, depth perception and a near spherical composite omnidirectional field of view. By having the active camera rotate around the outer perimeter, it can attain complete spherical access to the environment. The triangulation performance is evaluated experimentally using a target fixed to a long translation stage. Static positions of the target are estimated using a stereo pair that consists of one active perspective camera and one omnidirectional camera. Overall, the system provides sufficient accuracy to facilitate further surveillance research.