Dual-sensor foveated imaging system

Conventional imaging techniques adopt a rectilinear sampling approach, where a finite number of pixels are spread evenly across an entire field of view (FOV). Consequently, their imaging capabilities are limited by an inherent trade-off between the FOV and the resolving power. In contrast, a foveation technique allocates the limited resources (e.g., a finite number of pixels or transmission bandwidth) as a function of foveal eccentricities, which can significantly simplify the optical and electronic designs and reduce the data throughput, while the observer's ability to see fine details is maintained over the whole FOV. We explore an approach to a foveated imaging system design. Our approach approximates the spatially variant properties (i.e., resolution, contrast, and color sensitivities) of the human visual system with multiple low-cost off-the-shelf imaging sensors and maximizes the information throughput and bandwidth savings of the foveated system. We further validate our approach with the design of a compact dual-sensor foveated imaging system. A proof-of-concept bench prototype and experimental results are demonstrated. (C) 2008 Optical Society of America.