Geometry of Multiple Images: The Laws That Govern the Formation of Multiple Images of a Scene and Some of the Applications

Since the 1960s, researchers have made great strides in elucidating the laws of image formation, processing, and understanding by animals, humans, and machines. This book describes the state of knowledge in one subarea of vision, the geometric laws that relate different views of a scene. Geometry, one of the oldest branches of mathematics, is the natural language for describing three-dimensional shapes and spatial relations. Projective geometry, the geometry that best models image formation, provides a unified framework for thinking about many geometric problems relevant to vision. The book formalizes and analyzes the relations between multiple views of a scene from the perspective of various types of geometries. A key feature is that it considers Euclidean and affine geometries as special cases of projective geometry.

Olivier Faugeras is Research Director and head of the Robiovis Group at INRIA and Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.