Can a cylindrical lens replace a fisheye for 360x180 panoramas on a phone?
Asked 10/10/2015
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I'm wondering whether a plano-convex cylindrical lens could be used on a smartphone instead of a fisheye lens to capture 360x180 panoramas. My thought is that the lens might cover about 180° vertically, and then I could rotate the camera on a tripod to capture the full sphere with fewer shots than a normal phone panorama app.
Is this practical for photography, and if so, would standard panorama stitching software be able to handle the images?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
10y ago
2 Answers
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Whether the camera can focus to take an image through the lens is one issue. It doesn't look like this type of lens is used for image-taking. Googling around, I can't seem to find a single image taken with one. This type of lens looks like it's used for laser focusing or magnification. Not for photography.
But if you can use it for photography, then the problem comes when you want to stitch the images together. You'd have to know how to map out the lens properties and distortion characteristic for the stitching software you're using. And get your software to use your lens profile, because they're mostly only preset to use rectilinear or fisheye lenses for this task. Again, this isn't insurmountable, but would probably mean you can't use PhotoSphere, ICE, Photoshop's Merge or AutoStitch to do this. You'd probably have to use a PanoramaTools front-end, like Hugin, and you'd have to have the appropriate test chart and lens profiling skillz to create a profile specifically for your lens/camera combination.
Also, just my guess, but I really don't think you'd be gaining a lot of image quality over a fisheye adapter (I've seen surprisingly good results from those cheap adapters), and chances are that the more extreme distortion at the top and bottom of the frame would probably still require at least zenith and nadir shots if you're REALLY worried about image quality.
Originally by user27440. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user27440
10y ago
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Probably not as a practical substitute for a fisheye. A cylindrical lens is generally not intended as a taking lens for normal photography; it more often affects image scale in only one direction, similar in principle to anamorphic optics. Even if your phone could focus through it, the image would be heavily distorted in a way most panorama software does not expect.
Standard stitching tools are usually designed around rectilinear or fisheye lens models. With a cylindrical lens, you would likely need a custom lens/distortion profile and special processing before stitching. That makes it unlikely to work well with common apps such as phone panorama tools or typical auto-stitch software.
Also, if you digitally “stretch” the compressed dimension back to normal, you lose effective resolution in that direction. So while it may be theoretically possible with custom processing, it is not a simple or quality-preserving replacement for a fisheye for 360x180 panoramas on a phone.
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