Since computer vision¿s humble beginnings in the 1960s, a substantial amount of related research has been biologically inspired, using the human eye and visual perception as a model from which to work. Panoramic vision is a subset of computer vision that focuses on the creation and analysis of images with unusually wide fields of view that extend far beyond a single camera snapshot. It has broad implications for commercial and web-based multimedia applications, such as games, virtual reality, surveillance, and teleconferencing. This volume collects the works of researchers who have worked extensively in the field and covers a wide array of topics in this promising new area. In addition to providing a concise historical perspective on panoramic imaging, the book features representative sections on the design of panoramic image capturing systems, the theory involved in the imaging process, software techniques for creating panoramic images, and applications that use panoramic images. It will help readers to understand the more technical aspects of panoramic vision, such as sensor design and imaging techniques. Interest in panoramic vision will only increase over time, as faster computers and larger bandwidth become available and as specialized cameras become cheaper through economies of scale. Researchers and professionals in computer vision, imaging and robotics (machine vision) will find the book an authoritative and indispensable resource for panoramic vision concepts and methods.

Current cameras are poor imitations of the human eye and close descen dants in their design of ideas and a technology that are more than a century old. People in computer vision have traditionally used off-the-shelf cameras that were not meant for the uses they were intended for by these researchers: off-the-shelf cameras are designed to capture images to be printed on paper or looked at on a television screen, not for guiding robots or making 3D models of the environment or even surveilling a large area where very large field of views, high geometric and photometric accuracies are necessary. Quite a significant part of the efforts in computer vision has been targeted at overcoming algorithmically these problems. The authors of this book convince us that it is possible to abandon the traditional route of using standard cameras and to follow the path of designing new cameras explicitly for solving the tasks at hand in computer vision applications. This leads to different design concepts and allows to alleviate many of the difficulties encountered in the processing of the images taken with the "traditional" cameras."