An Efficient Hardware Architecture of Coordinate Transformation for Panorama Unrolling of Catadioptric Omnidirectional Images

Abstract

In this paper, we present an efficient hardware architecture of unrolling image mapper of catadioptric omnidirectional imaging systems. The catadioptric omnidirectional imaging systems generate images of 360 degrees of view and need to be transformed into panorama images in rectangular coordinate. In most application, it has to perform the panorama unrolling in real-time and at low-cost, especially for high-resolution images. The proposed hardware architecture adopts a software/hardware cooperative structure and employs several optimization schemes using look-up-table(LUT) of coordinate conversion. To avoid the on-line division operation caused by the coordinate transformation algorithm, the proposed architecture has the LUT which has pre-computed division factors. And then, the amount of memory used by the LUT is reduced to 1/4 by using symmetrical characteristic compared with the conventional architecture. Experimental results show that the proposed hardware architecture achieves an effective real-time performance and lower implementation cost, and it can be applied to other kinds of catadioptric omnidirectional imaging systems.