An Invitation to 3-D Vision: From Images to Geometric Models

This book is intended to give students at the advanced undergraduate or introduc­ tory graduate level, and researchers in computer vision, robotics and computer graphics, a self-contained introduction to the geometry of three-dimensional (3- D) vision. This is the study of the reconstruction of 3-D models of objects from a collection of 2-D images. An essential prerequisite for this book is a course in linear algebra at the advanced undergraduate level. Background knowledge in rigid-body motion, estimation and optimization will certainly improve the reader's appreciation of the material but is not critical since the first few chapters and the appendices provide a review and summary of basic notions and results on these topics. Our motivation Research monographs and books on geometric approaches to computer vision have been published recently in two batches: The first was in the mid 1990s with books on the geometry of two views, see e. g. [Faugeras, 1993, Kanatani, 1993b, Maybank, 1993, Weng et aI. , 1993b]. The second was more recent with books fo­ cusing on the geometry of multiple views, see e. g. [Hartley and Zisserman, 2000] and [Faugeras and Luong, 2001] as well as a more comprehensive book on computer vision [Forsyth and Ponce, 2002]. We felt that the time was ripe for synthesizing the material in a unified framework so as to provide a self-contained exposition of this subject, which can be used both for pedagogical purposes and by practitioners interested in this field.