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Stereo omni directional vision system for multimedia urban GIS
 B. Babu Madhavan Senior Researcher HOIP babu@softopia.pref.gifu.jp  Hideki Tanahashi Sr. Researcher, HOIP  Caihua Wang Sr. Researcher HOIP  Prof. Kazuhiko Yamamoto Chairman - HOIP Project Dept. of Information, Science Faculty of Engineering Gifu, University, Japan  Yoshinori Niwa Director, Senior Researcher HOIP Project niwa@softopia.pref.gifu.jp - JST, Softopia Japan
Abstract
This paper explains a vision based construction of a multimedia GIS by employing a new omni directional camera system called Stereo Omni directional imaging System (SOS). The SOS system with 60 cameras provides real-time omni directional images, stereo images and range information of surroundings. The images obtained from the SOS have been utilized to develop a multimedia GIS-Building Objects Information Systems (BOIS). BOIS is a multimedia GIS in which 2D and 3D information of each buildings can be obtained. It uses the knowledge base arrived from Remote Sensing and GIS data and employ computer vision techniques for integration. External environment information has been extracted from Remote Sensing and GIS data where as the internal (objects inside a building) environment information system is generated by the SOS.  Fig.1: SOS system Stereo Omni directional imaging System (SOS) The Stereo Omni directional imaging System (SOS), developed at Softopia Japan is capable of acquiring data in all directions from an observation point by using sixty cameras mounted on icosahedrons [1]. The cameras have flexibility of capturing images and range data at same time. The basic form of SOS system is icosahedrons over a sphere, which has 20 equilateral triangular planes (fig.1). Each equilateral triangular is holding 3 CCD cameras and thus a total 60 CCD cameras have been used to get omni directional images (fig.2). Again each equilateral triangle plane is subdivided into four sections. This kind of configuration does not obstruct the view of each camera and images can be captured to the full resolution of the camera. Further, the distortion of the images is comparatively less. Table 1. Summarises the system parameters. The twenty cameras fixed at the centre of the triangular plane are capable of producing colour as well as grey level images. The two cameras on the left and right side are stereo cameras. This system can acquire range images, colour as well as grey scale images at 640 X 480 resolution. In this system, three cameras are arranged to form two stereo pair, top/bottom and left/right with two baselines by arranging one standard camera vertically and horizontally.  Fig.2: Mosaic of all directional images (20 images)
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