Analysis of cylindrical stereo imaging

Conventional stereo imaging uses area CCDs for which depth perception error has been analyzed in our past research (Sahabi and Basu, 1996). In this work we analyze the depth perception error for a stereo system that uses two rotating linear CCD cameras to create cylindrical stereo images. Theoretical analysis shows certain advantages to cylindrical stereo imaging over conventional methods. Initial experimental results are presented to validate the theoretical results. Unlike normal area CCD cameras, rotating linear CCD cameras can capture very high resolution images thereby substantially reducing depth estimation error; more importantly, the error has certain directionally uniform characteristics