In this paper, we propose a novel and practical stereo camera system that uses only one camera and a biprism placed in front of the camera. The equivalent of a stereo pair of images is formed as the left and right halves of a single CCD image using a biprism. The system is therefore cheap and extremely easy to calibrate since it requires only one CCD camera. An additional advantage of the geometrical set-up is that corresponding features lie on the same scanline automatically.
The single camera and biprism have led to a simple stereo system for which correspondence is very easy and which is accurate for nearby objects in a small field of view. Since we use only a single lens, calibration of the system is greatly simplified. This is due to the fact that we need to estimate only one focal length and one center of projection. Given the parameters in the biprism-stereo camera system, we can recover the depth of the object using only the disparity between the corresponding points.