The Argus eye: a new imaging system designed to facilitate robotic tasks of motion

This article describes an imaging system that has been designed to facilitate robotic tasks of motion. The system consists of a number of cameras in a network, arranged so that they sample different parts of the visual sphere. This geometric configuration has provable advantages compared to small field of view cameras for the estimation of the system's own motion and, consequently, the estimation of shape models from the individual cameras. The reason is, inherent ambiguities of confusion between translation and rotation disappear. Pairs of cameras may also be arranged in multiple stereo configurations, which provide additional advantages for segmentation. Algorithms for the calibration of the system and the three-dimensional (3-D) motion estimation are provided.