Hemispheric Imaging System

Warfighters, unmanned systems, and weapons platforms need to rapidly and accurately assess wide regions of the battle space. Accomplishing this task with a single, high-definition, hemispherical imaging system can increase a soldier's survivability and lethality. There is a considerable need to develop an imaging system that can yield low distortion imagery while achieving low size, weight, and power criteria. Vecna proposes OmniEye, a camera for acquiring high-definition imagery for omnidirectional situational awareness. OmniEye achieves a hemispherical field-of-view by digitally compositing, in real-time, multiple images acquired from 17 calibrated image sensors. At the size of a quarter coin, OmniEye delivers 5 megapixel color spherical images at 30 frames per second. OmniEye corrects image distortion and aberrations in software by leveraging mobile GPUs. OmniEye features an intelligent frame grabbing mechanism that selects individual sensors in the array based on the viewing region. This capability significantly reduces the data transfer rate and processing requirements. When coupled with a VR display, this mechanism enables fast, responsive digital pan-tilt-zoom capabilities determined by the user's gaze direction. Also, OmniEye features a saliency detection module cues a user's attention to areas of interest in the view sphere using state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms for object detection and tracking.