A Study on Camera Array and Its Applications * *This research is funded by the State Key Laboratory of Geo-information Engineering under grant agreement NO. SKLGIE2015-M-3-4 and is supported by National Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61473230), National Science Foundation for Young Scholars of China (Grant No. 61603303) and Aviation Science Foundation(Grant No. 2014ZC53030)

The reduced cost of cameras and the complex scenes make it possible and necessary to replace the monocular camera with camera array under certain situations. In this paper, we first provide a review on the existing camera arrays and sort them according to the array arrangement, and then give an overview of the imaging properties that are benefited from the camera array including dynamic range, resolution, seeing through occlusions and depth estimation. At last, a novel camera array-based airborne optical system is proposed to meet the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) requirements for large field of view (FOV), high dynamic range and resolution, multi-view and multiple dimensions imaging. For the sake of onboard application of this system in practice, some key technologies are highlighted that need to be developed in the future research, such as the self-calibration and the synthetic aperture imaging by camera arrays on mobile platforms.