I've wondered what you'd get if you put a "photo finish" camera on the side of a car. The perspective would be out of whack (e.g. a 10 m long object 20 m away looks the same length as a 10 m long object 2000 m away) but it would be a much cheaper sensor than what Google uses for street view.
I would be excited to see someone try that, since it would produce an image that is effectively a parallel viewpoint in one axis and a pinhole camera in the other. I doubt it would be cheaper than Google's street view cameras, though, since standard cameras and lenses are commodity equipment.
An ordinary camera would work if mounted rigidly to the car, you could shoot a video and then take out the center line after the fact. 55 miles/hour is about 80 ft/sec so the horizontal resolution is a little bit more than a foot with a 60 fps video, you could make out houses but not read house numbers.
I think most webcams have a low-level interface that would let you read out part of the display without reading the rest so getting a better frame rate could be done at low cost too.
I think I'm going to try taking pictures of clouds first...
There is a whole family of "algorithms" for putting together a sequence of images, for instance, if a camera at the side of the road took a slice of pixels at a 45 degree angle you would get a picture of any car (esp license plate) or person who went by, but you would not get a video showing what they did in any detail.
Panorama mode is trying to make something that looks like "a good image", you would want to keep "tack sharp" if the source material is "tack sharp."
If you have 1000s of photographs of a scene you can reference them to each other and build a 3-d model and then synthesize many images you might want to see but it won't be "tack sharp" it will be a video game.
I believe that is essentially what airborne surveillance cameras (used to) do. They used a line-aperture moving film setup. I don’t know how they accounted for the velocity of the aircraft.
In the case of the car I have the following options:
1. from the diagnostics port under the steering wheel I can get the speed of the car from the car's electronic control unit
2. a hiking or computer GPS could be used, probably anything that isn't marketed as a car GPS is OK, the car GPS probably makes awful tracks because they don't want you asking questions like "how much faster can I do the quarter mile if I wrap the exhaust pipe, load this software patch into the the ECU and, take out the passenger and rear seats, radio, glove box cover, wiper blades, and bumpers?"
3. You could add an accelerometer and use a Kalman filter to combine that with other information sources to estimate vehicle position. Consumer accelerometers aren't that good, you are taking $2500 or so for one that car racers use.
I analyzed it to death and came to the conclusion that 1 will be good enough for a project which is the reverse of the camera being described: that is, put a neopixel strip on the side of my car and generate i think high quality images at night if someone happens to be focused at about the right distance but NOT tracking the vehicle.
