Thursday, January 05, 2006

Trifocal Tensor is cool!

I've been reading seriously about trifocal tensor from Forsyth & Hartley's books for the past week, making notes and crunching matrices and I understand most of the stuffs in that chapter now.
Yeah, making notes is really a must to accompany reading if it's to fully absorb the content. I find it useful and enjoyable. Just a little bit slow on reading. But there is a lot less of coming back to front forgetting what I've read.

For the general audience, Trifocal tensor is the geomatry of three camera configuration captured in a 3x3x3 tensor ( or 3D matrix ). With the trifocal tensor, one can recover the position of a point in a view given its corresponding point positions in two other views. The geometry is elegant. And the tensor notation is very compact, capturing a lots of stuffs in a few notations. It is beautiful maths!

It's very intimidating at first to see the jargon and horrible matrices with multiple subscripts and superscripts. But after sitting down quietly to crunch through the maths, it all makes good sense. :)

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