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A custom spherical light-field camera used as a polydioptricsystem where imagers are distributed over a spherical geometry, each having its own vision of the surrounding and distinct focal plane. The spherical light-field camera is also anomnidirectional camera which records light information fro many direction around its center. A novel linear blending technique is presented for vision reconstruction of a virtual observer located inside the spherical geometry of this camera. This blending technique improves the output quality of the reconstructed vision with respect to the ordinary stitching technique. A novel pixel gridding scheme is presented for rectangular displaying of the reconstructed vision induced from the spherical light field camera. This gridding technique preserve the correct size of objects when mapped on the spherical geometry of the Panoptic system. A hardware architecture based on FPGAs with the real-time implementation of the linear blending algorithm and the new pixel gridding scheme of the spherical light-field camera are presented along with imaging results. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Omnidirectional stereoscopy and depth estimation are complex problems of image processing to which the Panoptic camera offers a novel solution. The Panoptic camera is a biologically-inspired vision sensor made of multiple cameras. It is a polydioptric system mimicking the eyes of flying insects where multiple imagers, each with a distinct focal point, are distributed over a hemisphere. Recently, the omnidirectional image reconstruction algorithm (OIR) and its real-time hardware implementation have been proposed for the Panoptic camera. This paper presents an enhanced omnidirectional image reconstruction algorithm (EOIR) and its real-time implementation. The proposed EOIR algorithm provides improved realistic omnidirectional images and residuals compared to OIR. As a processing core of EOIR, 57% of the available slice resources in a Virtex 5 FPGA are consumed. The proposed platform provides the high bandwidth required to simultaneously process data originating from 40 cameras, and reconstruct omnidirectional images of 256x1024 pixels at 25 fps. This proposed hardware and algorithmic enhancements enable advanced real-time applications including omnidirectional image reconstruction, 3D model construction and depth estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]