Conventional video cameras have limited elds of view which make them restrictive for certain applications in computational vision. A catadioptric sensor uses a combination of lenses and mirrors placed in a carefully arranged con guration to capture a much wider eld of view. When designing a catadioptric sensor, the shape of the mirrors should ideally be selected to ensure that the complete catadioptric system has a single e ective viewpoint. In this paper, we derive the complete class of single-lens single-mirror catadioptric sensors which have a single viewpoint and an expression for the spatial resolution of a catadioptric sensor in terms of the resolution of the camera used to construct it. We also include a preliminary analysis of the defocus blur caused by the use of a curved mirror.
Simon Baker, Shree K. Nayar