Image rectification
Image rectification is a transformation process used to project images onto a common image plane. This process has several degrees of freedom and there are many strategies for transforming images to the common plane. Image rectification is used in computer stereo vision to simplify the problem of finding matching points between images (i.e. the correspondence problem), and in geographic information systems to merge images taken from multiple perspectives into a common map coordinate system. In computer vision Computer stereo vision takes two or more images with known relative camera positions that show an object from different viewpoints. For each pixel it then determines the corresponding scene point's depth (i.e. distance from the camera) by first finding matching pixels (i.e. pixels showing the same scene point) in the other image(s) and then applying triangulation to the found matches to determine their depth. Finding matches in stereo vision is restricted by epipolar geometry: Each pixel's match in another image can only be found on a line called the epipolar line. If two images are coplanar, i.e. they were taken such that the right camera is only offset horizontally compared to the left camera (not being moved towards the object or rotated), then