Automatic Differentiation, C++ Templates, and Photogrammetry

Abstract

Differential calculus is ubiquitous in digital movie production. We give a novel presentation of automatic differentiation, a method for computing derivatives of functions, that is not well known within the graphics community, and describe some applications of this method. In particular we describe the implementation of a photogrammetric reconstruction tool used on the post-production of Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions that was built using automatic differentiation.