<title>Spherical visual system for real-time virtual reality and surveillance</title>

Abstract

Abstract A spherical visual system has been developed for full field, web-based surveillance, virtual reality, and roundtable videoconference. The hardware is a CycloVision parabolic lense mounted on a video camera. The software was developed at theUniversity ofMissouri-Columbia. The mathematical model is developed by Su-Shing Chen and Michael Penna iii the 1980's.The parabolic image, capturing the ftill (360 degrees) hemispherical field (except the north pole) of view is transformed intothe spherical model of Chen and Penna. In the spherical model, images are invariant under the rotation group and are easilymapped to the image plane tangent to any point on the sphere. The projected image is exactly what the usual camera producesat that angle. Thus a real-time full spherical field video camera is developed by using two pieces ofparabolic lenses.1. IntroductionAs an important part of science, medical, engineering, business, and entertainment fields, visualization has to be realized invarious models. In addition to a limited few geometric models (image and stereo perspectives, cave and panoramic views),we investigate a wider variety of realization in geometric models. This paper is motivated by the consideration of somelimitations of orthographic and image perspectives in traditional computer graphics and visualization discussed by Chen and