Development of an artificial compound eye system for three-dimensional object detection

Abstract

A compound eye has the advantages of a large field of view, high sensitivity, and compact structure, showing that it can be applicable for 3D object detection. In this work, an artificial compound eye system is developed for 3D object detection, consisting of a layer of lenslets and a prism-like beam-steering lens. A calibration method is developed for this system, with which the correspondences between incident light rays and the relevant image points can be obtained precisely using an active calibration pattern at multiple positions. Theoretically, calibration patterns at two positions are sufficient for system calibration, although more positions will increase the accuracy of the result. 3D positions of point objects are calculated to evaluate the system, which are obtained by the intersection of multiple incident light rays in the least-squares sense. Experimental results show that the system can detect an object with angular accuracy of better than 1 mrad, demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed compound eye system. With a 2D scanning device, the system can be extended for general object detection in 3D space.

Compound eye and retina-like combination sensor with a large field of view based on a space-variant curved micro lens array

“…Equation (15) indicates that the overlapping angle (ω n ) at the nth ring is determined by the sectors (M ), the blind radius (r 0 ), and (R − L 0 ). Because the radius of the curved surfaced (R) and the distance between the space-variant CMLA and the image sensor (L 0 ) can be easily determined by the end user, the (R − L 0 ) is not discussed in this section.…”

“…They have received much attention in recent years due to their unique and exquisite optical properties [6][7][8]. The compound eye provides a compact optical structure with low-volume image processing, high sensitivity to fast-moving objects, and a larger field of view (FOV) [9][10][11][12][13], which can be widely used in motion detection, machine vision, optical imaging, and robotic systems [14,15]. Moreover, it is worth noting that an optical system with a large FOV is important and crucial to many applications, including industry, medical, and military areas [16,17].…”

Mining the Smartness of Insect Ultrastructures for Advanced Imaging and Illumination

“…In addition, ACE provides various optical properties: a wide FOV, fast motion sensitivity, and polarization sensitivity. Thanks to advanced microelectromechanical system (MEMS) fabrication technologies, various ACE structures including planar arrays, curved arrays, and micropolarizer are recently accomplished ( Figure ). Many studies of planar ACE structures have been performed to directly mount the ACE on the CMOS or CCD image sensors.…”

Fabrication and Characterization of Curved Compound Eyes Based on Multifocal Microlenses

“…As an increasingly important optical element, a microlens array (MLA) is characterized by its small size, light weight, and compactability. It provides a universal approach for compact micro-optics systems and is widely used in liquid crystal devices [ 1 , 2 ], laser beam homogenization [ 3 , 4 ], naked-eye 3D displays [ 5 ], and artificial compound eyes [ 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 ]. In particular, curved artificial compound eyes have generated more attention recently owing to their large field of view and low aberration or distortion.…”