Design of a novel panoramic lens without central blindness

The panoramic lenses are getting more and more popular in recent years. However, these lenses have the drawback of obscuring the rays of the coaxial fields, thus cause blind area in the center field of vision. We present a novel panoramic system consisting of two optical channels to overcome this issue, the system has a field of view (FOV) reaching 200 in vertical and 360 in horizontal direction without blindness area. The two channels have different focal lengths, providing design flexibility to meet application requirements where the center FOV or the marginal FOV is of more interest. The system has no half-reflecting surfaces to ensure high transmission ratio, but this feature greatly increase the design difficulty. The distortion of the novel lens is much smaller than traditional panoramic lenses since the distortion has two node points. Due to the ability of information acquisition in real-time and wide-angle, the novel panoramic lens would be very useful for a variety of real-world applications such as surveillance, short-throw projector and pilotless automobile.