360SCAN: High-speed rotating line sensor for real-time 360ß panoramic vision

This paper presents the novel smart camera “360SCAN” generating real-time 360° panoramic edge maps using a rotating dynamic vision sensor at up to 10 rotations per sec. The system consists of (1) a bio-inspired dynamic vision line sensor asynchronously reacting to relative contrast changes at high temporal resolution with on-chip time stamping (1μs resolution), having a high dynamic range and the sparse visual coding of the information, (2) a high-speed mechanical device rotating at up to 10 rotations per sec (rps) on which the sensor is mounted and (3) a real-time embedded software for the reconstruction of 360° panoramic views in a contrast map (events) as generated by the sensor. This work contributes by showing the camera capabilities in representing indoor and outdoor scene at certain illumination conditions. A set of experiments were made and evaluated for achieving typical angular resolutions of the panoramic views as well as the visual quality of the data. All evaluations were performed on natural scenes with ambient illuminations. Furthermore, we report 360SCAN results dealing with 360° panoramic views of the natural scene in real-time and at different rotations.