A Novel Sensing Device for Obtaining an Omni-directional Image of Three Dimensional Objects

Abstract

In most of the sensor-based tasks such as assembly, object recognition and environment detection, occlusion has been a major hindrance to extract exact necessary information. However, the occlusion problem is of an inherent nature in visual sensing and unavoidable. To date, local information alone had to suffice most of the researchers' interest. However, this local information alone is not suitable for detecting objects with complicated shapes. This is attributable to the fact that it can detect only a local scene along a fixed viewing direction. In this paper, we propose a new sensing device which can detect an omni-directional image of an object of interest. It consists of a pair of conic mirrors and a camera. The conic mirrors are configured such that the 2 pi image of an object is collected and then, projected onto the camera, which is the sensing principle of the sensing system. To evaluate performance of the proposed visual sensing system, a series of experiments are executed. System performance sensitivity is analyzed for various system parameters such as distance between mirrors and the vertex angle of conic mirrors. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.