Regular papers

Monocular multi-view stereo imaging system

¹ State Key Lab. of Industrial Control Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang 310027, China
² College of Science and Technology, Nihon University, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-8308, Japan
³ Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Meguro-ku, Tokyo, 152-8550, Japan

^* jiangwei@iipc.zju.edu.cn

Received: 23 July 2011

Abstract

In this study, we present a single-camera, multi-view stereo imaging system for capturing three-dimensional (3D) information. First, we design a monocular, multi-view stereo imaging device composed of a fisheye lens, and planar mirrors placed around the lens. The fisheye lens has a wide view-angle. The captured image includes a centered region of direct observation and surrounding regions of mirrored observations. These regions can be considered as images captured by multiple cameras at different positions and orientations. Therefore, the proposed device is equivalent to a synchronous multiple-cameras configuration, in which all the cameras share the same physical characteristics. In addition, we show how to place the mirrors in order to maximize the common view-angles, which is an important design consideration. Then, after calibrating the projection function of the fisheye lens, we obtain the positions and orientations of the virtual cameras from the external parameters. We also develop two multi-baseline stereo algorithms for the 3D measurement system. The first algorithm transforms the captured image to perspective images, and uses the traditional method to perform stereo determination. The second algorithm directly uses the original captured image along with an analysis of the epipolar geometry. Experimental results show that our system is more effective than traditional stereo methods that use a stereo pair, and it can achieve robust 3D reconstruction.