OPTICAL SYSTEM DESIGN OF ARTIFICIAL COMPOUND EYE BASED ON FIELD STITCHING

摘要

This paper presents an optical system design method for artificial compound eye (ACE) to realize large field-of-view (FOV) and high-resolution imaging. The designed ACE is actually a multi-aperture optical system which comprises layering cameras mounted over a hemisphere. Cameras are layered based on the field stitching principle, such that images captured by them can combine with each other to form a panoramic image. The design guidelines enable the construction of ACEs with arbitrary FOVs. In the experiment, an ACE consisting of seven cameras was fabricated with a spherical shell of radius 4 cm. Then a panoramic image with 758 FOV and 18 million pixels was obtained that demonstrated the validity of the proposed method. (C) 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.