Design and analysis of a novel omnidirectional stereovision system

Omnidirectional stereovision has wide applications in object detection, three-dimensional reconstruction and robot navigation thanks to its large field-of-view. In this paper, a novel configuration that consists of one single camera and multiple mirrors is proposed. The significant improvement is to design a principal mirror above the four sub mirrors placed in a plane to achieve four pairs of stereovision. A projection model with configuration parameters of this system is investigated in order to analyze the precision in reconstruction. Furthermore, the error propagation from image points to the triangulated 3D points and the effects of the system parameters on resulting measurement error are also given. Based on the simulation results, the optimal interval of these parameters is obtained.