A Mechatronics Approach for Design of Multiview Image Acquisition Setup for Scene Reconstruction with Single Camera

Conventional design approach is being actively replaced by concurrent design approach in the context of interdisciplinary systems. The proposed research work intends to develop a single moving camera based stereo vision system for scene reconstruction with the intrinsic advantage of multi-directional fields of view. The conventional stereo vision setup uses two stationary passive cameras to capture images of a scene from different vantage points. The proposed system imparts varying mechanical degrees of freedom motion for both the object and the camera which aids in acquiring sequence of images which covers all the visible regions of the object of interest. This gives better detail of the scene under consideration as compared to the conventional two images based stereopsis. A mechatronics design approach has been presented which carefully integrates various elements of the system such as the mechanisms, actuators, sensors and the electronic controller. The paper clearly pin points the cues for the design of the mechanical system which are obtained from the requirements of the computer vision system. The relative pose between the camera and the scene is governed by three independent degrees of freedom namely rotation angle for the object, tilt and working distance for the camera. The selection of the aforementioned parameters is decided by the specifications such as field of view, size of the object and sensor and spatial resolution. The proposed design predicts the system to enjoy benefits of reduced cost and improved flexibility in general.