Anamorphic lens for vision

Has anyone here tried or looked into using anamorphic lenses with their AprilTag vision systems? In theory it would give you a much wider field of view for detecting tags and all you would need to do would be to un-squeeze the image before processing like normal. Are there any logistical challenges to this I’m not thinking of?

#anigang

It may very well work, but there are two challenges that you should be mindful of:

  1. Undistortion is computationally expensive. The “normal” Apriltag algorithm looks for quadrilaterals in the image, and then only uses the camera calibration info at the SolvePnP step. When the lens is adding significant distortion, you first have to create an entire undistorted image, then run the quad detection on that. In other words, compensating for distortion requires orders of magnitude more CPU cycles and memory than the normal process.
  2. No matter what your lens is doing, your sensor has a fixed number of pixels. If you squeeze more area onto your sensor, even just in one axis, you have a corresponding loss of resolution in that axis.
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