Compact catadioptric wide imaging with secondary planar mirror

Wide FOV imaging systems are important for acquiring rich visual information. A conventional catadioptric imaging system deploys a camera in front of a curved mirror to acquire a wide FOV image. This is a cumbersome setup and causes unnecessary occlusions in the acquired image. In order to reduce both the burden of the camera deployment and the occlusions in the images, this study uses a secondary planar mirror in the catadioptric imaging system. A compact design of the catadioptric imaging system and a condition for the position of the secondary planar mirror to satisfy the central imaging are presented. The image acquisition model of the catadioptric imaging system with a secondary planar mirror is discussed based on the principles of geometric optics in this study. As a backward mapping, the acquired image is restored to a distortion-free image in the experiments.