Combining omnidirectional and stereo vision

[motters]

Last month I was experimenting with omnidirectional vision, using a
christmas decoration as a mirror. The thought occurred as to whether
it would be possible to combine the benefits of both omnidirectional
and stereo vision into a single system. At first I just thought of
using a regular stereo camera with a couple of mirrors, but probably
better than this can be achieved using a single camera with a wide
field of view and multiple mirrors. This is effectively the same as
having multiple cameras looking at the scene, with overlapping fields
of view.

I'm currently experimenting with these ideas within the omniclops
project.

http://code.google.com/p/omniclops/

The geometry for a multi-mirror system is more complicated than for
ordinary stereo vision, but not prohibitively so, and the spherical
shape of the mirrors tends to simplify the maths involved. I may be
able to use plane sweep stereo together with some photometric
consistency measure to get a colour 3D voxel model of the nearby
surroundings.