Panoramic depth imaging with a single standard camera

In this article, we present a panoramic depth imaging system. The system is mosaic-based which means that we use a single rotating camera and assemble the captured images in a mosaic. Due to an offset of the camera´s optical center from the rotational center of the system, we are able to capture the motion parallax effect which enables stereo reconstruction. The camera rotates on a circular path with the step defined by an angle equivalent to one column of the captured image. The equation for depth estimation can be easily extracted from the system geometry. To find the corresponding points on a stereo pair of panoramic images the epipolar geometry needs to be determined. We focused mainly on the system analysis. The system performs well in the reconstruction of small indoor spaces