Visual Plane
every picture states the point it is correct from
Concept

Ground plane rectification — where it appears

Undoing the perspective of a photographed ground, turning the picture into a plan that can be measured with a ruler. It is exact, because the map between two planes through a centre is a homography, and it needs four correspondences or the images of the plane's two circular points.

Named by 6 essays across 4 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

the picturethe same plane, rectifiedacross — 0.6000 widths (true 0.6000)along — 0.7667 widths (true 0.7667)diagonal — 1.2023 widths (true 1.2023)worst error 1e-15 relativethe probes were not used to build the map

The plan hidden in the photograph

Rectifying the ground is the same operation as rectifying a wall, and it turns a photograph into a site plan. The horizon is not an input to it and comes out as a consequence — the plan's points at infinity land on it, at first order, which is the check that the plan is a plan and not a plausible warp.

metrology · Rectify a camera looking downthe carpet is true, the people are nota camera looking levelthe people are true, the carpet is notthe two views a miniature is assembled from90° apart, exactly

A carpet and the people on it

A Persian miniature draws the ground as though from above and the figures standing on it as though from in front. The two views want optical axes exactly ninety degrees apart, and the plan view does not shorten a standing figure — it replaces its height with its distance from the point under the eye.

conventions · Twogrounds 15° of yaw, 6° of pitch, 1.50 throw ratio81.3% of the panel reaches the corrected rectangleouter: the thrown quadrilateral · inner: what correction can keep18.7% of the panel discarded

A projector is a camera run backwards

Turn a projector fifteen degrees from square and it throws a trapezium; keystone correction cannot add light outside it, so it shrinks the picture until it fits and discards a sixth of the panel. And the instrument itself comes back out of the picture it threw — 2880 panel pixels recovered against 2880, by the function the wrong field wrote for hand-drawn cubes.

screen · Keystone projectiveaffinemetricmidpointtwo equal sidesa right anglecross-ratioprojective———1.333333333affine0.500000——1.333333333metric0.5000001.00000090.000°1.333333333— means the stage does not determine it at allcross-ratio 1.333333 throughout

What one picture of a plane determines

A photograph of a tiled floor fixes that floor's geometry up to a projectivity, and no further. Supplying the horizon buys back the midpoint — exactly, and nothing else. Supplying the image of one circle buys the right angle and the ratio of two lengths at right angles. Three stages, three prices, and a quantity a stage does not determine has no value rather than a wrong one.

foundations · Stratification the photographthe ground, rectified5.205 m²four marks fix the plane; the shoelace does the rest1.8e-14

An area, out of one photograph

A patch of ground comes back at 5.205 m² from one photograph, to 1.8 × 10⁻¹⁴, through a homography built from four marks and their four known positions. What is worth knowing is how it degrades — the patch's extent across the picture is read with an error growing as the depth, its extent into the picture with an error growing as the depth squared, and at twenty-eight metres the two are sixteen times apart — which is the depth divided by the camera's height.

metrology · Area horizonthe horizon does not cut the circle — the pair is complexrectified from the two points aloneangles: 2.2e-13°ratios: 5.6e-15length: —circle of radius 1.05 ma dash is a quantity two points cannot buy

The two points a picture hides

The stratification rung says a photograph of a plane is projective, becomes affine when the vanishing line is known, and becomes metric with one more fact. The one more fact has a size and a shape: it is two points, complex conjugates on the vanishing line, and a rectification built from those two and nothing else returns every world angle to a tenth of a picodegree and every ratio of lengths to five parts in a quadrillion — and refuses to name a length.

foundations · Circularpoints

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

HomographyRectificationDemonstrationline at infinityProjective stratificationSimilaritySite planVanishing pointAbsolute conicAffine mapArea scaleCamera calibration

All concepts