“Extended cross-product” and solution of a linear system of equations

Abstract

Many problems, not only in computer vision and visualization, lead to a system of linear equations Ax = 0 or Ax = b and fast and robust solution is required. A vast majority of computational problems in computer vision, visualization and computer graphics are three dimensional in principle. This paper presents equivalence of the cross–product operation and solution of a system of linear equations Ax = 0 or Ax = b using projective space representation and homogeneous coordinates. This leads to a conclusion that division operation for a solution of a system of linear equations is not required, if projective representation and homogeneous coordinates are used. An efficient solution on CPU and GPU based architectures is presented with an application to barycentric coordinates computation as well.