Polyhedral Geometry and the Two-plane Parameterization

Recently the light-field and lumigraph systems have been proposed as general methods of representing the visual information present in a scene. These methods represent this information as a 4D function of light over the domain of directed lines. These systems use the intersection points of the lines on two planes to parameterize the lines in space. This paper explores the structure of the two-plane parameterization in detail. In particular we analyze the association between the geometry of the scene and subsets of the 4D data. The answers to these questions are essential to understanding the relationship between a lumigraph, and the geometry that it attempts to represent. This knowledge is potentially important for a variety of applications such as extracting shape from lumigraph data, and lumigraph compression.