An Invitation to 3-D Vision

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,