2 1 Introduction – a Tour of Multiple View Geometry
enhancing the Euclidean plane by the addition of these points at infinity where parallel
lines meet, and resolving the difficulty with infinity by calling them “ideal points.”
By adding these points at infinity, the familiar Euclidean space is transformed into a
new type of geometric object, projective space. This is a very useful way of thinking,
since we are familiar with the properties of Euclidean space, involving concepts such as
distances, angles, points, lines and incidence. There is nothing very mysterious about
projective space – it is just an extension of Euclidean space in which two lines always
meet in a point, though sometimes at mysterious points at infinity.
Coordinates. A point in Euclidean 2-space is represented by an ordered pair of real
numbers, (x, y). We may add an extra coordinate to this pair, giving a triple (x, y, 1),
that we declare to represent the same point. This seems harmless enough, since we
can go back and forward from one representation of the point to the other, simply by
adding or removing the last coordinate. We now take the important conceptual step
of asking why the last coordinate needs to be 1 – after all, the others two coordinates
are not so constrained. What about a coordinate triple (x, y, 2). It is here that we
make a definition and say that (x, y, 1) and (2x, 2y, 2) represent the same point, and
furthermore, (kx,ky, k) represents the same point as well, for any non-zero value k.
Formally, points are represented by equivalence classes of coordinate triples, where
two triples are equivalent when they differ by a common multiple. These are called the
homogeneous coordinates of the point. Given a coordinate triple (kx,ky, k), we can
get the original coordinates back by dividing by k to get (x, y).
The reader will observe that although (x, y, 1) represents the same point as the co-
ordinate pair (x, y), there is no point that corresponds to the triple (x, y, 0).Ifwetry
to divide by the last coordinate, we get the point (x/0,y/0) which is infinite. This is
how the points at infinity arise then. They are the points represented by homogeneous
coordinates in which the last coordinate is zero.
Once we have seen how to do this for 2-dimensional Euclidean space, extending it
to a projective space by representing points as homogeneous vectors, it is clear that we
can do the same thing in any dimension. The Euclidean space IR
n
can be extended to
a projective space IP
n
by representing points as homogeneous vectors. It turns out that
the points at infinity in the two-dimensional projective space form a line, usually called
the line at infinity. In three-dimensions they form the plane at infinity.
Homogeneity. In classical Euclidean geometry all points are the same. There is no
distinguished point. The whole of the space is homogeneous. When coordinates are
added, one point is seemingly picked out as the origin. However, it is important to
realize that this is just an accident of the particular coordinate frame chosen. We could
just as well find a different way of coordinatizing the plane in which a different point
is considered to be the origin. In fact, we can consider a change of coordinates for the
Euclidean space in which the axes are shifted and rotated to a different position. We
may think of this in another way as the space itself translating and rotating to a different
position. The resulting operation is known as a Euclidean transform.
A more general type of transformation is that of applying a linear transformation