
290 V GameEngineDesign
As a brief aside, conceptually the acquisition of an image with a camera uses
the same geometric concepts as rendering an image, except that the two oper-
ations are effectively inverses of one another. In rendering we have a geometric
model of the objects in the scene, and then we project them to an image plane.
With a camera, the 2D image is generated for us by the real world, and we are
trying to convert back to a 3D geometric representation of the objects in the
scene. Keeping this in mind during the following discussion should provide some
familiarity to the concepts being discussed.
2.3.1 Pinhole Camera Model
The simplest