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Fisheye cameras have been widely used in many applications including close range visual navigation and observation and cyber city reconstruction because its field of view is much larger than that of a common pinhole camera. This means that a fisheye camera can capture more information than a pinhole camera in the same scenario. However, the fisheye image contains serious distortion, which may cause trouble for human observers in recognizing the objects within. Therefore, in most practical applications, the fisheye image should be rectified to a pinhole perspective projection image to conform to human cognitive habits. The traditional mathematical model-based methods cannot effectively remove the distortion, but the digital distortion model can reduce the image resolution to some extent. Considering these defects, this paper proposes a new method that combines the physical spherical model and the digital distortion model. The distortion of fisheye images can be effectively removed according to the proposed approach. Many experiments validate its feasibility and effectiveness.