Fish-eye lens designs and their relative performance

New panoramic and immersive digital imaging developments have generated increased interest in high performance fisheye camera lenses suitable for 35 mm single lens reflex (SLR) cameras. Special concerns for such applications are the uniformity of illumination and radial image mapping. Because two hemispherical images are digitally stitched together to form a complete 360-degree x 180-degree image, the performance of the lens at the 90 degree (preferably more than 90 degree) edge of the fisheye image is just as important as the center of the image. Lateral color, high order distortion (edge compression) and severe drop-off of illumination at the full field become obvious image defects and cause seams in the immersive image. Fisheye lens designs have widely varying relative illumination and distortion across the hemispherical field of view of the lens. After describing the contributing factors to relative illumination, we survey a collection of fisheye designs and compare their illumination performance, radial mapping and lateral color. A new method of measuring relative illumination and radial mapping in the laboratory is described and results on commercially available fish-eye lenses are presented.