We propose a novel multi-scale template matching method which is robust against both scaling and rotation in unconstrained environments. The key component behind is a similarity measure referred to as scalable diversity similarity (SDS). Specifically, SDS exploits bidirectional diversity of the nearest neighbor (NN) matches between two sets of points. To address the scale-robustness of the similarity measure, local appearance and rank information are jointly used for the NN search. Furthermore, by introducing penalty term on the scale change, and polar radius term into the similarity measure, SDS is shown to be a well-performing similarity measure against overall size and rotation changes, as well as non-rigid geometric deformations, background clutter, and occlusions. The properties of SDS are statistically justified, and experiments on both synthetic and real-world data show that SDS can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods.
In unconstrained environments, to deal with nonrigid transformations and other noises, involving global information instead of pixel-wise local information for designing a robust similarity is a key cue. Histogram matching (HM) @cite_18 @cite_21 @cite_17 , which mainly measure the similarity between two color histograms, is not restricted by geometric transformation. However, it is usually not a good choice when background clutter and occlusions appear within the windows. Earth mover's distance (EMD) @cite_9 is proposed to measure the similarity between two probability distributions. Furthermore, a more robust approach @cite_6 is proposed by using spatial-appearance representation to measure the EMD. Tone mapping similarity measure @cite_12 is proposed for handling noise, which is approximated by a piece-wise constant linear function. Asymmetric correlation @cite_7 is proposed to deal with both the noise and illumination changes. Other measures focus on improving the robustness against noise as proposed in M-estimator @cite_0 @cite_5 and Hamming-based distance @cite_10 @cite_14 . We refer the interested readers to a comprehensive survey @cite_4 .
@cite_18 @cite_14 @cite_4 @cite_7 @cite_9 @cite_21 @cite_6 @cite_0 @cite_5 @cite_10 @cite_12 @cite_17
2143668817 1980807298 2254589950 2172156198
We investigate the properties of a metric between two distributions, the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD), for content-based image retrieval. The EMD is based on the minimal cost that must be paid to transform one distribution into the other, in a precise sense, and was first proposed for certain vision problems by Peleg, Werman, and Rom. For image retrieval, we combine this idea with a representation scheme for distributions that is based on vector quantization. This combination leads to an image comparison framework that often accounts for perceptual similarity better than other previously proposed methods. The EMD is based on a solution to the transportation problem from linear optimization, for which efficient algorithms are available, and also allows naturally for partial matching. It is more robust than histogram matching techniques, in that it can operate on variable-length representations of the distributions that avoid quantization and other binning problems typical of histograms. When used to compare distributions with the same overall mass, the EMD is a true metric. In this paper we focus on applications to color and texture, and we compare the retrieval performance of the EMD with that of other distances. We suggest a novel shape contour descriptor for shape matching and retrieval. The new descriptor is called contour points distribution histogram (CPDH) which is based on the distribution of points on object contour under polar coordinates. CPDH not only conforms to the human visual perception but also the computational complexity of it is low. Invariant to scale and translation are the intrinsic properties of CPDH and the problem of the invariant to rotation can be partially resolved in the matching process. After the CPDHs of images are generated, the similarity value of the images is obtained by EMD (Earth Mover's Distance) metric. In order to make the EMD method used effectively for the matching of CPDHs, we also develop a new approach to the ground distance used in the EMD metric under polar coordinates. Experimental results of image retrieval demonstrate that the novel descriptor has a strong capability in handling a variety of shapes. Earth Mover's Distance (EMD), as a similarity measure, has received a lot of attention in the fields of multimedia and probabilistic databases, computer vision, image retrieval, machine learning, etc. EMD on multidimensional histograms provides better distinguishability between the objects approximated by the histograms (e.g., images), compared to classic measures like Euclidean distance. Despite its usefulness, EMD has a high computational cost; therefore, a number of effective filtering methods have been proposed, to reduce the pairs of histograms for which the exact EMD has to be computed, during similarity search. Still, EMD calculations in the refinement step remain the bottleneck of the whole similarity search process. In this paper, we focus on optimizing the refinement phase of EMD-based similarity search by (i) adapting an efficient min-cost flow algorithm (SIA) for EMD computation, (ii) proposing a dynamic distance bound, which can be used to terminate an EMD refinement early, and (iii) proposing a dynamic refinement order for the candidates which, paired with a concurrent EMD refinement strategy, reduces the amount of needless computations. Our proposed techniques are orthogonal to and can be easily integrated with the state-of-the-art filtering techniques, reducing the cost of EMD-based similarity queries by orders of magnitude. This paper proposes a new approach for the discovery of common patterns in a small set of images by region matching. The issues in feature robustness, matching robustness and noise artifact are addressed to delve into the potential of using regions as the basic matching unit. We novelly employ the many-to-many (M2M) matching strategy, specifically with the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD), to increase resilience towards the structural inconsistency from improper region segmentation. However, the matching pattern of M2M is dispersed and unregulated in nature, leading to the challenges of mining a common pattern while identifying the underlying transformation. To avoid analysis on unregulated matching, we propose localized matching for the collaborative mining of common patterns from multiple images. The patterns are refined iteratively using the expectation-maximization algorithm by taking advantage of the ''crowding'' phenomenon in the EMD flows. Experimental results show that our approach can handle images with significant image noise and background clutter. To pinpoint the potential of Common Pattern Discovery (CPD), we further use image retrieval as an example to show the application of CPD for pattern learning in relevance feedback.