Incorporating lens distortion into the design of undistorted catadioptric omnidirectional cameras

An improved approach for design of the catadioptric omnidirectional camera with horizontal scene undistorted imaging is described. In the proposed approach, the influence of the lens distortion on the imaging quality of the omnidirectional camera is taken into account. We establish a radial distortion model for an image pickup lens and retain some opposite distortion in the mirror to correct the distortion existing in the image pickup lens. A horizontal scene undistorted catadioptric omnidirectional camera is designed with an off-the-shelf TV short focus lens using our approach; the numerical simulation shows that the distortion introduced by the imaging lens is eliminated effectively.