A Personal Computer Based 360 Degree Vision Distributed Aperture System

Visible light cameras are commonly used for surveillance applications. However, a single camera can only provide a limited field of view (FOV). To overcome this problem, distributed aperture systems (DAS) are developed to provide a broader FOV by combining the views from multiple cameras. In this paper, we present a personal-computer-based 360 degree vision DAS system, and describe how to offline estimate the orientations of the cameras constituting the DAS system, as well as online synthesize a virtual view in real time. Our system is able to synthesize a color virtual view of up to 2048×1024 pixels at a speed of 39 frames per second (fps). A large majority of the workload of the online synthesis of the virtual view is implemented on the Graphic Processing Unit (GPU).