<p>Yes, this is called bilinear interpolation or a bilinear mapping. The term "bilinear" crops up more commonly in the context of image resizing or resampling, but it's the same basic idea for transforming quadrilaterals—it's just that the interpolation is applied to the vertex positions of the quad, instead of the colors of pixels in an image.</p>

<p>One paper that briefly discusses bilinear mappings of quadrilaterals is <a href="https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ph/texfund/texfund.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Fundamentals of Texture Mapping and Image Warping</a> by Paul Heckbert; see section 2.2.2.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-09-01T05:00:49.610Z
2017-09-01T05:00:49.610Z
Nathan Reed
<p>When warping the contents of an arbitrary quadrilateral to another by extrapolating equal points along both the "lengths" and "widths", thus ignoring all perspective effects / foreshortening, we are not using a "homography" or "affine" mapping.</p>

<p>Is there a correct name to describe the type of mapping we are doing?</p>

<p><a href="https://i.sstatic.net/Z2ix7.gif" rel="noreferrer"><img src="https://i.sstatic.net/Z2ix7.gif" alt="(Looking for example image ...)"></a></p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-08-25T16:11:49.413Z
It does look like it from that link. In fact it's the first term that popped into my head but the initial Google hits seemed to be mostly about something that looked different to me.
hippietrail
<mapping><terminology>
Is there a term for mapping between two arbitrary quadrilaterals without using homography / perspective projection?
hippietrail
# Is there a term for mapping between two arbitrary quadrilaterals without using homography / perspective projection?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2017-08-25)

When warping the contents of an arbitrary quadrilateral to another by extrapolating equal points along both the "lengths" and "widths", thus ignoring all perspective effects / foreshortening, we are not using a "homography" or "affine" mapping.

Is there a correct name to describe the type of mapping we are doing?

[![(Looking for example image ...)](https://i.sstatic.net/Z2ix7.gif)](https://i.sstatic.net/Z2ix7.gif)

**Tags:** mapping, terminology

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: It does look like it from that link. In fact it's the first term that popped into my head but the initial Google hits seemed to be mostly about something that looked different to me.  

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## 1 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2017-09-01. Score: 2 | Accepted answer

Yes, this is called bilinear interpolation or a bilinear mapping. The term "bilinear" crops up more commonly in the context of image resizing or resampling, but it's the same basic idea for transforming quadrilaterals—it's just that the interpolation is applied to the vertex positions of the quad, instead of the colors of pixels in an image.

One paper that briefly discusses bilinear mappings of quadrilaterals is [Fundamentals of Texture Mapping and Image Warping](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ph/texfund/texfund.pdf) by Paul Heckbert; see section 2.2.2.


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