A Low-Cost Portable Polycamera for Stereoscopic 360° Imaging

This paper proposes a low-cost and portable polycamera system and accompanying methods for capturing and synthesizing stereoscopic 360° panoramas. The polycamera consists of only four cameras with fisheye lenses. Synthesizing panoramas from only four views is challenging because the cameras view very differently and the captured images have significant distortions and color degradation including vignetting, contrast loss, and blurriness. For coping with these challenges, this paper proposes methods for rectifying the polyview images, estimating depth of the scene, and synthesizing stereoscopic panoramas. The proposed camera is compact in size, light in weight, and inexpensive. The proposed methods allow the synthesis of visually pleasing stereoscopic 360° panoramas using the images captured with the proposed polycamera. We have built a prototype of the polycamera and tested it on a set of scenes with different characteristics of depth ranges and depth variations. The experiments show that the proposed camera and methods are effective in generating stereoscopic 360° panoramas that can be viewed on popular virtual reality displays.