Math proves that as long as an object has at least eight points, any photo of it is basically a unique, un-faked fingerprint.
arXiv · March 17, 2026 · 2603.14172
The Takeaway
It was previously unknown if you could move a camera to a specific spot to make one set of points look exactly like a different set. This study proves that while you can 'fake' a photo of up to seven points to look like something else, eight points are the universal limit where every complex object becomes visually unique and impossible to mimic from any angle.
From the abstract
Generically, one expects the images of two different point sets, in two different (projective) cameras, to be different. However, it can happen that the images are the same up to a projective transformation which is an instance of ill-posedness in computer vision. We prove that the images can become projectively equivalent only for point pairs with at most seven elements. In each case, we give explicit descriptions of the Zariski closure of the locus of camera centers which we call the centers-v