Omnivergent Stereo-panoramas with a Fish-eye Lens

We present a novel approach to the calibration of an ultra wide angle fish eye lenses. These lenses have the field of view larger than 180◦, therefore the common calibration methods based on the classical pinhole camera model with a planar retina cannot be employed. A new camera model is proposed together with a calibration method for extracting its parameters. Experiments evaluating the proposed technique are presented. We also present an example of a camera that can be described by the proposed model and calibrated by the proposed method. It consists of a standard of-the-shelf fish eye adapter from Nikon and a common CCD camera. Possible fields of employment of this sensor include construction of 360 x 360 mosaics.