Fundamentals of Visual Perspective and its Influence on Renaissance Art, AI and Robotics

Catalog description

Perspective projection has revolutionized art and architecture. Its principles have been discovered and formalized during the Renaissance by none other than Filippo Brunelleschi who is also the engineer of the Santa Maria del Fiore dome - the symbol of Florence. The laws that govern linear perspective describe the mapping of 3D Geometry onto a 2D image plane and can create the illusion of depth and space on a flat canvas. Almost every Renaissance artist adopted these laws. Today, perspective projection is fundamental to the area of Computer Vision that focuses on understanding images both spatially and semantically. It is also a fundamental component of robot perception, allowing a robot to reconstruct the environment around it to safely navigate or interact with it. In the proposed course, I will bring students on the journey from the Renaissance to modern Computer Vision and Robotics by teaching the basics of perspective projection. We will study projective geometry through pen & paper or basic coding exercises as well as through the analysis of Renaissance paintings, architecture and sculpture. The course is adaptive to the background of the students. Students will finish this course with an individual or group project that uses existing tools that leverage the concepts learned during the course to record and reconstruct parts of the city of Florence for digital preservation. Upon completion, students will be fluent in the basics of 3D Computer Vision and will have designed at least one digital artifact based on these techniques. Students without a STEM background have the opportunity to study works of art from a more formal viewpoint of perspective projection and 3D Computer Vision. STEM students get the chance to think about how their skills relate to digital creativity, or the preservation of cultural artifacts in the service of humanities.