HDROmni: Optical Extension of Dynamic Range for Panoramic Robot Vision

This paper presents the design method to optically extend the perceptible dynamic range of panoramic vision for robotics. The large range of scene radiance is captured in real-time by a combination of paraboloidal mirrors, a telecentric lens and neutral density filters. The first prototype made of 4 mirrors and 3 neutral density filters increases 100 times the perceptible dynamic range of the used camera. Results in various challenging scenes compare the new camera to low dynamic range ones. They show that the dynamic range quality of images doubles, on average. They also show significant benefit for feature-based approaches, i.e. much more matched features, and direct ones, i.e. much higher positioning accuracy of direct visual servoing.