Abstract

We describe a new type of range camera that performs stereoscopic measurements in both the horizontal and vertical directions but uses only a single main lens. The main lens forms an image in the usual way, but a lenticular array is placed in the image plane to break the image up into a set of "microimages." Each microimage covers several charge-coupled device elements, and different parts of this microimage correspond to light passing through different parts of the main aperture. By electronically selecting different parts of the micro-images, one can simulate the images that would be acquired by inserting various aperture stops in the main lens. In particular, one can simulate the effects of moving a small aperture stop in the horizontal and vertical directions; thus one can obtain the equivalent images that would be obtained by a small-baseline stereoscopic system. Displacements are calculated by a least-squares gradient method and are then converted to range estimates.

© 1990 Optical Society of America