A novel stereo camera system by a biprism

We propose a novel and practical stereo camera system that uses only one camera and a biprism placed in front of the camera. The equivalent of a stereo pair of images is formed as the left and right halves of a single charge coupled device (CCD) image using a biprism. The system is therefore cheap and extremely easy to calibrate since it requires only one CCD camera. An additional advantage of the geometrical setup is that corresponding features lie on the same scanline automatically. The single camera and biprism have led to a simple stereo system for which correspondence is very easy and accurate for nearby objects in a small field of view. Since we use only a single lens, calibration of the system is greatly simplified. Given the parameters in the biprism-stereo camera system, we can reconstruct the three-dimensional structure using only the disparity between the corresponding points