360 degrees imaging systems design, implementation and evaluation

Existing 360 degrees imaging systems are efficient and have a good result. But some are expensive, others does not provide a full documentation about their design and implementation to customize it for some specific tasks. In this paper we built four different portable systems for outdoor 360° panoramic images capturing using open source software and off-the-shelf hardware, by minimizing the budget and maximizing the efficiency. Each one of these systems consists of a specific image capturing unit and a computing unit. The first system is a spherical mirror based system; the second and the third systems are multi-camera based systems and the last one is ball lens based system. We provide the design, the implementation and the test result for each system. We site some problems encountered and how we deal with them.