The Intro to Imaging with Catadioptric Sensors

So many people in the past have attempted to capture a wide angle image without any distortion to the viewer. Have you guys ever heard of Robocup? It's World Cup for robotic dogs with cameras and sensors attached to them in order to determine their movements.

 

The objective of the game is the same as soccer, to put the ball in the opponent's net.  Sounds simple enough.  BUT, the problem was the long time required for the dogs to scan the field because of the limited angle of view from the camera.  This problem was detrimental to the fast pace of the exciting game of soccer.  The cameras designed to address   the problem were too heavy for the dogs to function properly and were too expensive.  Nonetheless, researchers in their later studies made use of mirrors in combination with cameras to obtain a wider view.  That's where we come into the picture.  The Mirror Squad's mission is to find a solution for capturing a 180 degree field of view (FOV) with minimum distortion. 

Are you guys up for a little bit of history? We promise to make fun! Before all of us were born, around 400BC, Aristotle was among the first to comment on how sunlight beam going through a square hole in a dark room create a circular image. This phenomenon was later used to created the Camera Obscura or more popularly referred to as Pinhole Camera.  When light passes through a pinhole camera, it turns the image up-side-down because light travels in a straight line.

 Due to the up-side-down image created in above process, later a mirror was used to reflect the image right-side-up.