Catadioptric panoramic lens with a rectilinear projection scheme

The usefulness of a hyperbolic surface as a panoramic mirror has been investigated, and image distortion was found to be difficult to eliminate and the optical parameters not easy to control. The newly proposed panoramic mirror, based on a numerical analysis, is not a single viewpoint imaging system. However, the field of view can almost be arbitrarily chosen to suit the application purpose, and the image distortion becomes increasingly small for far objects.