Like a traditional fisheye lens, Tailored Distortion™ is ideal for security applications where an ultra-wide field of view is required. Tailored Distortion offers some key advantages over a traditional fisheye, however. This is true particularly for 360º surveillance cameras or in applications where post-processing or dewarping of the image is either unneeded or undesirable.
The reason for this is two-fold. First, traditional fisheye lenses suffer from compression of the image at the edges. Since there is simply more area to cover at the periphery of the imaged area, the edge of the image becomes compressed, with less pixels available per unit area. This can be a critical issue for 360º imaging applications, since the areas of interest are usually located at the edges of the image (see example below).
Tailored Distortion largely solves this situation by intentionally compressing the center of the image, leaving more pixels available at the edge. This results in high resolution throughout the image. Tailored Distortion lenses also behave in a predictable way, so that post-dewarping is still an option, and in fact delivers more uniform and higher resolution across the entire image than a comparable, traditional fisheye lens. The second primary advantage of Tailored Distortion is that it provides a more rectilinear image. The result is an image that maintains a more realistic perspective that is much less disorienting than traditional fisheye images. This means that many applications, such as doorbell phones or 360º surveillance may not require any software dewarping at all.
And since Tailored Distortion is all done optically, there is no software manipulation of the actual image, thus avoiding many of the issues sometimes associated with post-processing.
Please contact OPTICS CONCEPT support team for details for more information.
