A Novel HDR Depth Camera for Real-time 3D 360-degree Panoramic Vision

Ahmed Nabil Belbachir, Stephan Schraml, Manfred Mayerhofer, Michael Hofstatter; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2014, pp. 419-426

This paper presents a novel 360° High-Dynamic Range (HDR) camera for real-time 3D 360° panoramic computer vision. The camera consists of (1) a pair of bio-inspired dynamic vision line sensors (1024 pixel each) asynchronously generating events at high temporal resolution with on-chip time stamping (1 µs resolution), having a high dynamic range and the sparse visual coding of the information, (2) a high-speed mechanical device rotating at up to 10 revolutions per sec (rps) on which the pair of sensor is mounted and (3) a processing unit for the configuration of the detector chip and transmission of its data through a slip ring and a gigabit Ethernet communication to the user. Within this work, we first present the new camera, its individual components and resulting panoramic edge map. In a second step, we developed a method for reconstructing the intensity images out of the event data generated by the sensors. The algorithm maps the recorded panoramic views into gray-level images by using a transform coefficient. In the last part of this work, anaglyph representation and 3D reconstruction results out of the stereo images are shown. The experimental results show the capabilities of the new camera to generate 10 x 3D panoramic views per second in real-time at an image resolution of 5000x1024 pixel and intra-scene dynamic range of more than 120 dB under natural illuminations. The camera potential for 360° depth imaging and mobile computer vision is briefly highlighted.