Real-time FPGA implementation of linear blending vision reconstruction algorithm using a spherical light field camera

A custom spherical light-field camera used as a polydioptric system where imagers are distributed over a spherical geometry, each having its own vision of the surrounding and distinct focal plane. The spherical light-field camera is also an omnidirectional camera which records light information from any direction around its center. A novel linear blending technique is presented for vision reconstruction of a virtual observer located inside the spherical geometry of this camera. This blending technique improves the output quality of the reconstructed vision with respect to the ordinary stitching technique. A novel pixel gridding scheme is presented for rectangular displaying of the reconstructed vision induced from the spherical light field camera. This gridding technique preserve the correct size of objects when mapped on the spherical geometry of the Panoptic system. A hardware architecture based on FPGAs with the real-time implementation of the linear blending algorithm and the new pixel gridding scheme of the spherical light-field camera are presented along with imaging results.