Design and Analysis of a Single-Camera Omnistereo Sensor for Quadrotor Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs)

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel single-camera omnistereo sensor design using hyperboloidal mirrors for quadrotor MAVs, enabling practical 3D sensing with analytical geometry and uncertainty estimation.

Contribution

It introduces a practical omnistereo system with a co-axial camera-mirror setup, deriving analytical solutions under the single viewpoint constraint for MAV applications.

Findings

Achieved panoramic 3D sensing with a single camera-mirror system

Analyzed system characteristics like resolution and field-of-view

Developed a probabilistic depth uncertainty model

Abstract

We describe the design and 3D sensing performance of an omnidirectional stereo-vision system (omnistereo) as applied to Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). The proposed omnistereo model employs a monocular camera that is co-axially aligned with a pair of hyperboloidal mirrors (folded catadioptric configuration). We show that this arrangement is practical for performing stereo-vision when mounted on top of propeller-based MAVs characterized by low payloads. The theoretical single viewpoint (SVP) constraint helps us derive analytical solutions for the sensor's projective geometry and generate SVP-compliant panoramic images to compute 3D information from stereo correspondences (in a truly synchronous fashion). We perform an extensive analysis on various system characteristics such as its size, catadioptric spatial resolution, field-of-view. In addition, we pose a probabilistic model for uncertainty estimation of the depth from triangulation for skew back-projection rays. We expect to motivate the reproducibility of our solution since it can be adapted (optimally) to other catadioptric-based omnistereo vision applications.