Introduction

Images are generally produced using a digital camera, which captures a scene by projecting light going through its lens onto an image sensor. The fact that an image is formed by the projection of a 3D scene onto a 2D plane implies the existence of important relationships both between a scene and its image and between different images of the same scene. Projective geometry is the tool that is used to describe and characterize, in mathematical terms, the process of image formation. In this chapter, we will introduce you to some of the fundamental projective relations that exist in multi-view imagery and explain how these can be used in computer vision programming. But, before we start the recipes, let's explore the basic concepts related to scene projection and image formation.

Image formation

Fundamentally, the process used to produce images has not changed since the beginning of photography. The light coming from an observed scene is captured by a camera through a frontal aperture...