TOMBO is a compound-eye imaging system in which an image sensor is divided into multiple sections by small lenses. The system has notable features such as the capability of capturing various types of object signals at a time, flexibility in optical system design suitable for given purposes, and so on. Owing to the system composition, most of the previous researches were performed under specific indoor environments so that the application targets were limited.
In this study, we developed a mobile TOMBO system capable of operating in a field environment. Related to the structure of TOMBO, the baseline for distant measurement is very short. In the outdoors environment, the distance to the target objects is long, so that the parallax is too small to be detected. On the other hand, such a small parallax provides an advantage in multi-modal observation of the same object because the field-of-views of individual lenses are almost identical. Considering these properties, the mobile TOMBO system is suitable for multi-spectral imaging. A prototype system was developed with an embedded computer, Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, connecting to a multi-spectral TOMBO. The spectral channels were set as 450nm, 530nm, 660nm, 740nm, 730nm, 770nm, 850nm, 910nm, and 970nm.
The developed TOMBO system was mounted on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and aerial observation experiments were performed. Aiming at the application of plant monitoring, the observed aerial images were evaluated by a normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) used in remote sensing. The obtained results confirmed the effectiveness and potential capabilities of the mobile TOMBO system.