In 1906, physicist Robert W. Wood invented the fisheye lens using "a bucket of water, a pinhole camera, mirrored glass, and a lot of light". The goal of the inventor was to create an image that would mimic how a fish sees the world underwater. The physicist’s curiosity to see the world from a fish's perspective helped to the invention of the first commercial fisheye lens a few decades later.
Robin Hill first designed a lens with 180° coverage used for sky research in 1924, this lens was patented in 1923. Nowadays, The Hill Sky Lens is considered to be the first fisheye lens.
The efforts of German inventors to replicate the fisheye image with an optical lens were carried out with a Japanese company, you have probably heard the name of this company: Nikon. In 1957, with the creation of Nikon's first $27,000 180° fisheye lens, this lens has become popular for many fields although the purpose of its invention was the desire to see the whole sky.
As I mentioned before, these lenses serve people's purposes in many different areas. Let's look at some of the usage areas of these lenses.
Fisheye lenses are perfect for capturing movements and showing viewers different perspectives in extreme sports such as skateboarding.
In the film industry, the ability to make doors and peepholes distorted just like real life, thus giving the audience the feeling of seeing through the eyes of the character in the movie, has taken the fisheye lens to another dimension in this field.
Since the fisheye lens provides covering more areas with a single camera, it is frequently preferred in the security and traffic sectors in terms of hardware and installation costs.
So what is the place of the fisheye lens in our company?
By using this lens with the algorithms we have developed, we compute origin-destination based vehicle count, make route classification, and detect stationary objects. Thus, we can provide security and management at intersections with a single camera.
References
Wood, R. W. (August 1906). "Fish-Eye Views, and Vision under Water" (PDF). The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science. 6. XII (LXVIII): 159–161
Hill, R. (1924). A lens for whole sky photographs. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 50(211), 227-235.
https://web.archive.org/web/20010206204641/http://www.nikon.co.jp/main/eng/d-archives/camera/history_e.htm#camera8.0