Matching 3-D models to 2-D images

We consider the problem of analytically characterizing the set of all 2-D images that a group of 3-D features may produce, and demonstrate that this is a useful thing to do. Our results apply for simple point features and point features with associated orientation vectors when we model projection as a 3-D to 2-D affine transformation. We show how to represent the set of images that a group of 3-D points produces with two lines (1-D subspaces), one in each of two orthogonal, high-dimensional spaces, where a single image group corresponds to one point in each space. The images of groups of oriented point features can be represented by a 2-D hyperbolic surface in a single high-dimensional space. The problem of matching an image to models is essentially reduced to the problem of matching a point to simple geometric structures. Moreover, we show that these are the simplest and lowest dimensional representations possible for these cases. We demonstrate the value of this way of approaching matching by applying our results to a variety of vision problems. In particular, we use this result to build a space-efficient indexing system that performs 3-D to 2-D matching by table lookup. This system is analytically built and accessed, accounts for the effects of sensing error, and is tested on real images. We also derive new results concerning the existence of invariants and non-accidental properties in this domain. Finally, we show that oriented points present unexpected difficulties: indexing requires fundamentally more space with oriented than with simple points, we must use more images in a motion sequence to determine the affine structure of oriented points, and the linear combinations result does not hold for oriented points.