A decoupled virtual camera using spherical optical flow

Sarthak Pathak, Alessandro Moro, Atsushi Yamashita, Hajime Asama

Abstract: In camera-equipped teleoperated robots, it is often tedious for the operator to manage both the viewpoint and the shaky/unstable navigation, leading to disorientation. Our proposal is to create a virtual, freely rotatable camera that is decoupled from the robot's rotation. It is implemented using a complete spherical camera and removing its rotation in-image with a novel algorithm based on aligning the dense spherical optical flow field along the epipolar direction. Finally, any area on the rotation-less image sequence can be undistorted, resulting in the desired decoupled camera. We illustrate the concept by showing the effect on some videos taken from a spherical camera under different robot motions.