Equiresolution catadioptric sensors

A prominent characteristic of most catadioptric sensors is their lack of uniformity of resolution. We describe catadioptric sensors whose associated projections from the viewing sphere to the image plane have constant Jacobian determinants and so are equiresolution in the sense that any two equal solid angles are allocated the same number of pixels in the image plane. We show that in the orthographic case the catoptric component must be a surface of revolution of constant Gaussian curvature. We compare these equiresolution sensors in both the perspective and orthographic cases with other sensors that were proposed earlier for treating the uniformity-of-resolution problem. (c) 2005 Optical Society of America.