From a different perspective

We use many different cues to obtain information about the three dimensional shape of an object from its two dimensional image. The most common is linear perspective, and this has been used by Renaissance artists since the fifteenth century.

The Florentine artist Masaccio was one of the first painters to use linear perspective rigorously. A wonderful example is found in his fresco 'The Trinity' in the church of Santa Maria Novella, Florence, completed in 1427. Researchers in Computer Vision under the leadership of Dr Roberto Cipolla have studied the mathematics involved in linear perspective and by this means are able to invert the projection of the painting to recover the three dimensional model from the painting.

Click on the photograph to 'walk in' to the scene (MPEG).
(Model created by Dr Antonio Criminisi)