Patent ID: 8253777

Claim:
A panoramic camera comprising: a housing; a plurality of camera modules received in the housing, each camera module comprising a lens, a reflective mirror, and an image sensor arranged in an order written from an object side to an image side, the camera modules configured for cooperatively forming a 360 degrees view image of the surrounding scene; a plurality of viewfinders each corresponding to each camera module; and an image processor, wherein an angle is defined between the plane of the reflective mirror and a light sensing surface of the image sensor in each camera module, and each reflective mirror is rotatable between a first position where the angle is an acute angle, light is reflected by the reflective mirror to the corresponding viewfinder, and a second position where the angle is about 90 degrees, light is incident upon the light sensing surface of the image sensor, and the image processor stitches together the images captured by the camera modules into a single panoramic image of the surrounding scene.