Pinhole camera Diagram

When writing an article on the intrinsic camera matrix, I created a diagram to illustrate various properties of the pinhole camera. I've made the Adobe Illustrator source file available under a creative commons license. My hope is that others can use this for instructional purposes and hopefully improve upon it. Feel free to modify it to your needs, and if you use it in your project, I'd love to hear about it.

The file is split into several layers, which include

• Pinhole camera w/ labels
• Principal axis / Principal point
• Principal point offset
• Focal Length
• 3D scene
• Scene image on film
• Scene image on virtual image plane

You can use the "saved views" feature in Illustrator to see some example configurations, which you can see below.

Basic pinhole camera.

Focal length

Principal point and axis

Principal point offset

Principal point offset, shifted pinhole

Principal point offset, shifted film

Pinhole camera with frustum

Frustum only, with true image plane

Frustum only, virtual image plane only.