Epipole — where it appears
Named by 18 essays across 6 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.
The image of the other eye
Two photographs of one courtyard, and in each of them a point that is the other camera. It is computed from forty-four matched marks and nothing else, and it lands on the projection of the other eye to about a billionth of a pixel.
A point is a line over there
Knowing where a mark sits in one photograph does not say where it sits in the other. It says which line it is on, which removes one of the two unknowns and leaves one — and the five lines drawn here meet at a point to within a thirtieth of a billionth of a pixel.
A turn of the head is not a step sideways
The textbook says a short baseline makes reconstruction ill-conditioned. Measured, the algebra does not notice — a two-millimetre baseline recovers the courtyard to nine digits from exact marks. What fails is the ratio of baseline to reading error, and it fails without refusing.
Seven marks, three answers
Seven correspondences leave a two-dimensional nullspace, and the requirement that a fundamental matrix be singular is a cubic in the mix — one or three real roots. Here it has three, and all three satisfy every one of the seven marks to 8.9 × 10⁻⁹ pixels. The eighth mark, withheld, separates them by more than an order of magnitude.
One surface, two images
A water surface reflects what is above it and refracts what is below it in the same photograph, from the same plane. The reflected half has a centre of projection to 1 × 10⁻¹⁴ m and every theorem about central projection applies to it; the refracted half misses its own best-fitting point by 28.6 mm and none of it does. And the landscape manual's rule for drawing a reflection turns out to be the epipole placed at infinity, which is why it costs nothing at zero tilt and 11.5 px at twenty-two degrees.
One shutter, two views
A photograph with a mirror in it is a stereo pair, and a peculiarly well-behaved one. Its fundamental matrix is skew-symmetric, so both epipoles are the same point; that point is where the camera would see its own lens; and every line joining a mark to its reflection passes through it, to 1.4 × 10⁻¹² px. The baseline is twice the distance to the glass, which is the one number a single view cannot supply and a tape measure can.
Two matches are enough
A general fundamental matrix has seven free numbers and needs eight correspondences. A mirror pair's has two, and two correspondences fix it — with a straightedge, on a print, by drawing the line from each mark to its reflection and marking where the two cross. Given the same sixteen marks read to four tenths of a pixel, the constrained fit lands 4.8 times closer to the truth than the eight-point algorithm.
Square to the camera is the worst mirror
A mirror pair's baseline runs along the mirror's normal, so a mirror facing the camera puts the second eye directly behind the first — the forward-motion arrangement, with the epipole in the middle of the frame and the rays to a mark crossing at 23°. Turning it forty-four degrees opens that to 65° and cuts the worst depth error threefold, and the number to watch is not the angle but where the reflected lens sits on the print.
A mirror that is not parallel to the wall
Carry the depth in front of the glass an equal depth behind it, square to the wall. That is exact for a mirror hung parallel to the wall and 1.26 metres — 107 pixels — out for one turned 20°. Two invariants survive the turn instead, and one of the two nearly did not survive being tested, because it had been written in a form that could not fail.
Two marks off a known plane find the other eye
Map a courtyard's ground from one picture into the other, and every raised mark lands somewhere the map did not send it — displaced along a line through the image of the other camera, to a fifth of a billionth of a pixel. Two such marks put that image where it is, and with it the whole epipolar geometry.
An epipole in the picture leaves a blind disc
Step a camera half a metre straight forward and the image of the other eye sits in the middle of both pictures. Around it lies a disc where one pixel of reading costs a tenth of the depth or more — 20 px across a surface 2 m off, 247 px at 16 m — and at its centre no depth is recovered at any range.
The two pencils keep one number
Four lines through the image of the other eye in one picture, and the four epipolar lines they become in the other. The angles between them change by up to 11.4°; their cross-ratio is 3.012836 on both sides, to eight parts in a trillion. Three pairs of lines fix the map between the pencils, and the fourth is predicted to a third of a billionth of a pixel.
Two mirrors are three cameras
A photograph with two mirrors in it holds three views of the scene from three places, at baselines of 2.90, 3.10 and 2.26 metres. Two of the three pairwise geometries are mirror pairs and are skew; the third is a rotation by twice the angle between the mirrors, and it is not new evidence — five numbers read off the print rebuild it to 9.4 × 10⁻¹⁴ pixels, where a general three-view arrangement needs eighteen.
A symmetric object is its own stereo pair
A building with a plane of symmetry photographed once gives fourteen correspondences whose joining lines meet at one point to 1.9 × 10⁻¹² pixels, a skew-symmetric matrix, and the object's whole shape to fifteen digits — with no mirror anywhere and no second exposure. What it does not give is the size, and the instrument that decides whether any of it applies is the same meeting point, which opens to 12.7 pixels when the symmetry is half a per cent out.
A parallax length is a height over a depth
After a known plane's map, every raised mark's displacement points at the other camera's image, and its length carries the mark's height above the plane over its depth — but not as the ratio of lengths it looks like. That ratio departs from the point's own number by up to 45 per cent. Read as a coefficient on the epipole, the same length gives height over depth from the first camera to four parts in a hundred trillion, the same from every second picture.
A dolly zoom off the axis keeps a line, not a plane
Step toward a subject along a track that is not quite the line of sight, and zoom to hold its size, and the plane that stood still in the classic shot stops standing still. The step now spreads from a point beside the centre while the zoom still shrinks toward the centre, and the two cancel only along one row of the picture, one depth per column. The subject itself slides by f·d·sin ψ over its distance — a pixel once the track is a quarter of a degree out — and turning to follow it holds the subject at the price of bending the rest of its plane, while shifting the frame instead holds the whole plane exactly.
A sway gives the blind centre a depth, not a good one
A camera driving straight forward cannot see how far away the thing it is driving toward is: the mark at the epipole does not move between pictures. Let one of three pictures sway sideways and the centre gets a depth at once — but a depth resting on the sway alone, which a pixel of reading moves by the focal length's reciprocal times the depth over the sway. For a centimetre of steering wobble at eight metres that is 144 per cent; for a tenth of the forward step, 29. The hole closes; the disc around it stays until the sway is a third of the step.
A plane's coefficient reaches as far as its parallax
After a known plane's map, every raised point's displacement is its height over its depth, read as a coefficient on the epipole — exactly, for any point either picture sees. The worry was that the number would be local, good only near the floor whose marks fixed the map. Read to a pixel, it is not a distance on the floor that runs out. It is a length in the picture: the point's error is about 260 per cent over its parallax in pixels, wherever the point stands.
Named alongside it
The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.
Fundamental matrixBaselineCorrespondenceEpipolar geometryParallaxMirror planeConditioningdegrees of freedomHomographyDegenerate configurationDepth uncertaintyreconstruction ambiguity