Does camera rotation help with a stereo depth map?
I'm thinking of creating a simple dual webcam setup for testing OpenCV's stereo depth map feature. All the examples and descriptions I've seen setup the cameras in a fixed position, pointing them straight ahead with their line-of-sight perfectly parallel to each other.
Are there any cases where the cameras are mounted on separate movable axis where they can slightly rotate side to side, in order to "focus" them on a specific point closer or farther away? I'm thinking of a process similar to how the human eye rotates side to side in order to focus on different depth ranges.
Can OpenCV make use of this ability, or does it assume fixed cameras?
Be aware that you can work with generally oriented cameras if you can easily identify your feature in the images, so once you get the feature position you can back-project it into 3D and find the intersection of the 2 optic rays (in this case you don't need the epipolar constraint). If you can't detect your feature in both images and cameras are not alligned to find correspondences you'll have to scan the entire image and here is where epipola lines come in help as Martin said.