# Rethinking Camera Choice: An Empirical Study on Fisheye Camera Properties in Robotic Manipulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02139 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02139/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04137/) (2023)
- [π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24164/) (2024)
- [Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03476/) (2016)
- [Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12213/) (2024)
- [What Matters in Learning from Offline Human Demonstrations for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03298/) (2021)
- [RLBench: The Robot Learning Benchmark & Learning Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12271/) (2019)
- [Universal Manipulation Interface: In-The-Wild Robot Teaching Without In-The-Wild Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10329/) (2024)
- [MimicGen: A Data Generation System for Scalable Robot Learning using Human Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17596/) (2023)
- [Causal Confusion in Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11979/) (2019)
- [3D Diffuser Actor: Policy Diffusion with 3D Scene Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10885/) (2024)
- [ManiSkill: Generalizable Manipulation Skill Benchmark with Large-Scale Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14483/) (2021)
- [DexCap: Scalable and Portable Mocap Data Collection System for Dexterous Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07788/) (2024)
- [Scaling Up and Distilling Down: Language-Guided Robot Skill Acquisition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14535/) (2023)
- [Data Scaling Laws in Imitation Learning for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18647/) (2024)
- [WoodScape: A multi-task, multi-camera fisheye dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01489/) (2019)
- [DexMimicGen: Automated Data Generation for Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation via Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24185/) (2024)
- [Fighting Copycat Agents in Behavioral Cloning from Observation Histories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14876/) (2020)
- [OmniDet: Surround View Cameras based Multi-task Visual Perception Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07448/) (2021)
- [ChatVLA-2: Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Embodied Reasoning from Pretrained Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21906/) (2025)
- [UnRectDepthNet: Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation using a Generic Framework for Handling Common Camera Distortion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06676/) (2020)
- [SynWoodScape: Synthetic Surround-view Fisheye Camera Dataset for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05056/) (2022)
- [Near-field Perception for Low-Speed Vehicle Automation using Surround-view Fisheye Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17001/) (2021)
- [What Matters in Learning from Large-Scale Datasets for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13536/) (2025)
- [Do You Need Proprioceptive States in Visuomotor Policies?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18644/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [RoboPocket: Improve Robot Policies Instantly with Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05504/) (2026)
- [UMI-3D: Extending Universal Manipulation Interface from Vision-Limited to 3D Spatial Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14089/) (2026)
- [FA-RDP: A Frequency-Adaptive Reactive Diffusion Policy for Contact-Rich Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28596/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The adoption of fisheye cameras in robotic manipulation, driven by their exceptionally wide Field of View (FoV), is rapidly outpacing a systematic understanding of their downstream effects on policy learning. This paper presents the first comprehensive empirical study to bridge this gap, rigorously analyzing the properties of wrist-mounted fisheye cameras for imitation learning. Through extensive experiments in both simulation and the real world, we investigate three critical research questions: spatial localization, scene generalization, and hardware generalization. Our investigation reveals that: (1) The wide FoV significantly enhances spatial localization, but this benefit is critically contingent on the visual complexity of the environment. (2) Fisheye-trained policies, while prone to overfitting in simple scenes, unlock superior scene generalization when trained with sufficient environmental diversity. (3) While naive cross-camera transfer leads to failures, we identify the root cause as scale overfitting and demonstrate that hardware generalization performance can be improved with a simple Random Scale Augmentation (RSA) strategy. Collectively, our findings provide concrete, actionable guidance for the large-scale collection and effective use of fisheye datasets in robotic learning. More results and videos are available on https://robo-fisheye.github.io/