Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Projective space, rational maps, and other notions from algebraic geometry appear naturally in the study of image formation and various camera models in computer vision. Considerable attention has been paid to multiview ideals, which collect all polynomial constraints on images that must be satisfied by a given camera arrangement. We extend past work on multiview ideals to settings where the camera arrangement is unknown. We characterize various "image formation ideals", which are interesting objects in their own right. Some nice previous results about multiview ideals also fall out from our framework. We give a new proof of a result by Aholt, Sturmfels, and Thomas that the multiview ideal has a universal Groebner basis consisting of k-focals (also known as k-linearities in the vision literature) for k in {2,3,4}. (Preliminary report based on ongoing joint projects with Sameer Agarwal, Max Lieblich, Jessie Loucks Tavitas, and Rekha Thomas.)