The Joint Image Handbook

Abstract

Given multiple perspective photographs, point correspondences form the "joint image", effectively a replica of three dimensional space distributed across its two-dimensional projections. This set can be characterized by multilinear equations over image coordinates, such as epipolar and trifocal constraints. We revisit in this paper the geometric and algebraic properties of the joint image, and address fundamental questions such as how many and which multilinearities are necessary and/or sufficient to determine camera geometry and/or image correspondences. The new theoretical results in this paper answer these questions in a very general setting and, in turn, are intended to serve as a "handbook" reference about multilinearities for practitioners.