Image Warping - Overview

Overview

While an image can be transformed in various ways, pure warping means that points are mapped to points without changing the colors. This can be based mathematically on any function from (part of) the plane to the plane. If the function is injective the original can be reconstructed. If the function is a bijection any image can be inversely transformed.

The following list is not meant to be a partitioning of all available methods into categories.

• Images may be distorted through simulation of optical aberrations.
• Images may be viewed as if they had been projected onto a curved or mirrored surface. (This is often seen in raytraced images.)
• Images can be partitioned into polygons and each polygon distorted.
• Images can be distorted using morphing.

There are at least two ways to generate an image using whatever chosen methods to distort.

• (forward-mapping) a given mapping from sources to images is directly applied
• (reverse-mapping) for a given mapping from sources to images, the source is found from the image

To estimate what kind of warping has taken place between consecutive images, one can use optical flow estimation techniques.