Stereo with coplanar sensor rotation

This paper presents a new stereo configuration based on sensor rotation. Different from the traditional stereo vision system which consists of multiple cameras, our rotational stereo device is built with a single image sensor. By constraining the sensor's planar motion perpendicular to the optical axis with an offset to the axis of rotation, the visual parallax can be generated with multiple viewpoints. The stereo image pairs captured with sensor rotation are used for correspondence matching and disparity computation. A variation of multiple baseline stereo with radial configuration is proposed. It is able to provide more flexible stereo baseline settings and improve the accuracy of depth measurement. The geometric formulation and computational algorithms are developed, and a prototype range sensing device is constructed. Experimental results obtained from the real scene environment have demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed technique.