Real-time multispectral color video synthesis using an array of commodity cameras

For consumer imaging applications, multi-spectral color refers to capturing and displaying images in more than three primary colors in order to achieve color gamuts significantly larger than those produced by RGB capture and display devices. In this paper, we describe the building of a multi-camera recording system using off-the-shelf video cameras that, unlike existing multi-camera systems which rely on expensive and time consuming optical alignment of camera views, relies upon the virtual alignment of cameras performed in software and in real-time. Once images are properly aligned, the described camera system represents a recording platform that scales linearly in cost with the number of color primaries where new colors are added by simply attaching more cameras, and in this paper, we illustrate frames of the color video produced using a five camera system. The real-time aspects of this work are to both (1) collect an arbitrary number of colors simultaneously recording video at video rate and (2) synthesize and display the aligned channels on the computer screen on-line and in real time. (C) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.