Patent ID: 7176960

Claim:
An imaging system for acquiring an omnidirectional mosaic image comprising: an image slice camera having a large field of view in a first direction and a small imaging width in a second direction, the image slice camera receiving rays of light incident on the camera within the large field of view, at least a portion of said incident rays being substantially parallel to each other with respect to said second direction, said portion of rays being directed to an area of an imaging sensor to form image slice data; a rotational drive system operatively coupled to the image slice camera, the rotational drive system rotating the image slice camera along an axis of rotation substantially parallel to the first direction; a control unit operatively coupled to the rotational drive system and image slice camera, the control unit receiving the image slice data from the image slice camera and recording corresponding rotational positional information of the rotational drive system, the control unit acquiring a plurality of image slices at known rotational positions and concatenating said image slices to form an omnidirectional mosaic image data.