Application of panoramic annular lens for motion analysis tasks: surveillance and smoke detection

In this paper some applications of motion analysis are investigated for a compact panoramic optical system (panoramic annular lens). Panoramic image acquisition makes multiple or mechanically controlled camera systems needless for many applications. Panoramic annular lens´ main advantage to other omnidirectional monitoring systems is that it is a cheap, small, compact device with no external hyperboloidal, spherical, conical or paraboloidal reflecting surface as in other panoramic optical devices. By converting the annular image captured with an NTSC camera to a rectangular one, we get a low-resolution (2.8 pixels/degrees horizontally and 3 pixels/degree vertically) image. We developed algorithms which can analyze this low-resolution image to yield motion information for surveillance and smoke detection