Patent ID: 7215364

Claim:
In an imaging system for obtaining a wide field of view comprising a plurality of imaging devices each having a defined field of view and each of the imaging devices having a mechanism for capturing an image at a selected time instant, apparatus for positioning the plurality of imaging devices in an arcuate array such that the field of view of each device overlaps the field of view of each adjacent device, a control module for simultaneously actuating each of the imaging devices for capturing an image within the field of view of all devices concurrently, a method for combining the images from each of the devices to produce a wide field of view image, comprising: determining a centroid of the array of imaging devices: identifying objects that are common to images obtained from adjacent ones of the imaging devices and grouping the common objects based upon distance from the centroid into bins; performing gross registration of the identified objects using auto-correlation; selecting points on the identified common objects based upon bin identification; applying an n-dimensional polynomial to merge the common identified points in one image into alignment with points in an adjacent image; and creating a continuous image from the merged plurality of adjacent images.