Depth Measurement Based on Stereo Vision With Integrated Camera Rotation

Measuring the distance is one of the main objectives for sensor development. In this article, we present a new sensor system design for depth recovery. It is based on stereopsis with the integrated rotation of an image sensor. Different from conventional stereo vision systems with multiple cameras, the proposed rotational stereo configuration is built upon a single imaging device. By directing its lateral motion with a circular constraint, the visual parallax is generated from multiple viewpoints. The image pairs captured with the integrated sensor rotation are used for the correspondence matching and disparity computation. Moreover, a variation of multiple-baseline stereo with multiple base-angle implementation is proposed. It provides a flexible baseline setting to improve the depth measurement accuracy. The geometric formulation and computational algorithm are derived and developed. In the experiments, a prototype range sensing device is constructed. The results obtained from the real scene environment have demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed depth measurement approach.