During the last few years, innovative optical design strategies, which consist of generating and controlling the image mapping, have been successfully developed to produce high-resolution digital imagers. This design strategy has increased the interest in high-resolution camera, which is used for absolute measurement and high-resolution wide-angle lenses. These new generations of panoramic lenses include catadioptric panoramic lenses, panoramic annular lenses, visible/IR fisheye lenses, anamorphic wide-angle attachment, and visible/IR panomorph lenses. Because a wide angle lens images a large field of view on a limited number of pixel, a systematic pixel to angle mapping will help to efficiently use each pixel into the field of view. The various relevant tradeoffs will be detailed and the advantages and disadvantages of panoramic lenses will be discussed. A particular concern in the optical design of a panoramic imager is the uniformity of the image quality. Because two hemispherical images can be digitally stitched together to form a complete 360-degrees X 360-degrees image, the performance of the lens at 90 degrees (preferably more than 90 degrees) of the imager is just as important as the centre of the image. Lateral colour, edge compression (distortion) and severe drop-off of the relative illumination become also important image defects and may cause seams in the immersive image. Finally we will present various modern scenarios where high-resolution panoramic imager will be most than welcome.

Date Published: 15 September 2007
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 6667, Current Developments in Lens Design and Optical Engineering VIII, 666703 (15 September 2007); doi: 10.1117/12.735759

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6667:
Current Developments in Lens Design and Optical Engineering VIII
Pantazis Z. Mouroulis; Warren J. Smith; R. Barry Johnson, Editor(s)