Generating High-Resolution Image and Depth Map Using a Camera Array With Mixed Focal Lengths

Abstract

Producing high-resolution images and depth maps of a scene is critical to many applications. Although some imaging systems today are equipped with multiple cameras, the output image resolution is usually only a small fraction of the total number of sensor pixels. To significantly increase the output pixel ratio, we propose an imaging system that consists of an array of telescopic cameras and a wide-angle camera. By minimizing the overlap between the telescopic cameras and maximizing the overlap between the low-resolution wide-angle camera and the telescopic cameras, a camera system with nonparallel optical axes is created. The heterogeneous images of different resolutions are fused into a high-resolution wide-angle image, and its corresponding depth map is generated by pairwise heterogeneous matching. The performance of the proposed imaging system is evaluated using both synthetic and real data.