A novel hybrid architecture for real-time omnidirectional image reconstruction

The Panoptic camera is an omnidirectional multi-aperture visual system which is realized by mounting multiple imaging sensors on a hemispherical frame. It is a spherical light-field camera system that records light information from any direction around its center. Omnidirectional light field reconstruction algorithm, its centralized and distributed real-time hardware implementations were previously presented by the authors. In this work, we analyze advantages and disadvantages of previous approaches and propose a novel high performance hybrid architecture based on a tree based network topology for real-time omnidirectional image reconstruction. The novel hybrid architecture increases the scalability of the Panoptic camera systems while utilizing fewer resources. Furthermore, the tree based structure allows implementing further signal processing applications such as omnidirectional feature extraction which was not possible in centralized and distributed implementations.