Finding Intrinsic and Extrinsic Viewing Parameters from a Single Realist Painting

In this paper we studied the geometry of a three-dimensional tableau from a single realist painting – Scott Fraser’s Three way vanitas (2006). The tableau contains a carefully chosen complex arrangement of objects including a moth, egg, cup, and strand of string, glass of water, bone, and hand mirror. Each of the three plane mirrors presents a different view of the tableau from a virtual camera behind each mirror and symmetric to the artist’s viewing point. Our new contribution was to incorporate single-view geometric information extracted from the direct image of the wooden mirror frames in order to obtain the camera models of both the real camera and the three virtual cameras. Both the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters are estimated for the direct image and the images in three plane mirrors depicted within the painting.