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The Geometry of Multiple Images
By Oliver Faugeras and Quang-Tuan Luong.
MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. US. 2001.
644 pp. Illus. b/w.
ISBN: 0-262-06220-8.
Reviewed by Robert Pepperell, University of Wales College, Newport,
Caerleon Campus, Newport NP18 3YH, Wales.
E-mail: pepperell@cwcom.net
One of the disadvantages of choosing books to review by their titles alone
is that sometimes the titles can be misleading literal. I erroneously
imagined "The Geometry of Multiple Images" to be a treatise on cubism and
its simultaneous presentations of different views of the same object. In
fact, as the strap-line makes clearer ("The laws that govern the formation
of multiple images of a scene and some of their applications") the book is
a precise technical manual for those designing machine vision systems. Its
600-odd pages are tightly packed with diagrams and algebraic formulae
describing the mathematics of stereoscopy and scene recognition. Although
I'm not qualified to assess it merits, it seems to be a comprehensive and
authoritative text-book on the subject. There are, however, some digestible
(for me) chunks covering the historical background of optics and imaging
that could be of more general interest to artists. For example, there is a
concise section on the development of the pinhole camera obscura and its
role in the discovery of perspective during the Renaissance. This said, the
book as a whole is unlikely to be of wide interest due to its inevitably
technical nature.
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