We present a novel feature matching algorithm that systematically utilizes the geometric properties of features such as position, scale, and orientation, in addition to the conventional descriptor vectors. In challenging scenes with the presence of repetitive patterns or with a large viewpoint change, it is hard to find the correct correspondences using feature descriptors only, since the descriptor distances of the correct matches may not be the least among the candidates due to appearance changes. Assuming that the layout of the nearby features does not changed much, we propose the bidirectional transfer measure to gauge the geometric consistency of a pair of feature correspondences. The feature matching problem is formulated as a Markov random field (MRF) which uses descriptor distances and relative geometric similarities together. The unmatched features are explicitly modeled in the MRF to minimize its negative impact. For speed and stability, instead of solving the MRF on the entire features at once, we start with a small set of confident feature matches, and then progressively search the candidates in nearby features and expand the MRF with them. Experimental comparisons show that the proposed algorithm finds better feature correspondences, i.e. more matches with higher inlier ratio, in many challenging scenes with much lower computational cost than the state-of-the-art algorithms.
The proposed work differs from these algorithms in several ways. We directly measure the geometric dissimilarity between correspondences using the position, scale, and orientation provided by local features, instead of the distances between neighboring features and their corresponding features @cite_22 , the length and direction differences of correspondences @cite_15 or homography transformation using additional affine region detector @cite_7 @cite_39 @cite_10 . The proposed algorithm can be used with most available local features as long as the geometric properties are provided, not limited to a few specific local features. Also, unlike the previous approaches @cite_33 @cite_31 @cite_37 @cite_1 @cite_17 that perform estimation on the entire feature set at once, our algorithm incrementally finds the geometrically reasonable matches in whole feature set from the initial set of features. Because of this, the proposed algorithm can handle a large number of features and produce more accurate matches with minimal computational cost.
@cite_31 @cite_37 @cite_22 @cite_7 @cite_33 @cite_1 @cite_39 @cite_15 @cite_10 @cite_17
2166820607 2101639445 2076080556 1587878450 1744214816 35665245
We present an efficient spectral method for finding consistent correspondences between two sets of features. We build the adjacency matrix M of a graph whose nodes represent the potential correspondences and the weights on the links represent pairwise agreements between potential correspondences. Correct assignments are likely to establish links among each other and thus form a strongly connected cluster. Incorrect correspondences establish links with the other correspondences only accidentally, so they are unlikely to belong to strongly connected clusters. We recover the correct assignments based on how strongly they belong to the main cluster of M, by using the principal eigenvector of M and imposing the mapping constraints required by the overall correspondence mapping (one-to-one or one-to-many). The experimental evaluation shows that our method is robust to outliers, accurate in terms of matching rate, while being much faster than existing methods We present an efficient method for feature correspondence and object-based image matching, which exploits both photometric similarity and pairwise geometric consistency from local invariant features. We formulate object-based image matching as an unsupervised multi-class clustering problem on a set of candidate feature matches, and propose a novel pairwise dissimilarity measure and a robust linkage model in the framework of hierarchical agglomerative clustering. The algorithm handles significant amount of outliers and deformation as well as multiple clusters, thus enabling simultaneous feature matching and clustering from real-world image pairs with significant clutter and multiple deformable objects. The experimental evaluation on feature correspondence, object recognition, and object-based image matching demonstrates that our method is robust to both outliers and deformation, and applicable to a wide range of image matching problems. Graph matching plays a central role in solving correspondence problems in computer vision. Graph matching problems that incorporate pair-wise constraints can be cast as a quadratic assignment problem (QAP). Unfortunately, QAP is NP-hard and many algorithms have been proposed to solve different relaxations. This paper presents factorized graph matching (FGM), a novel framework for interpreting and optimizing graph matching problems. In this work we show that the affinity matrix can be factorized as a Kronecker product of smaller matrices. There are three main benefits of using this factorization in graph matching: (1) There is no need to compute the costly (in space and time) pair-wise affinity matrix; (2) The factorization provides a taxonomy for graph matching and reveals the connection among several methods; (3) Using the factorization we derive a new approximation of the original problem that improves state-of-the-art algorithms in graph matching. Experimental results in synthetic and real databases illustrate the benefits of FGM. The code is available at http: humansensing.cs.cmu.edu fgm. Graph matching is an essential problem in computer vision and machine learning. In this paper, we introduce a random walk view on the problem and propose a robust graph matching algorithm against outliers and deformation. Matching between two graphs is formulated as node selection on an association graph whose nodes represent candidate correspondences between the two graphs. The solution is obtained by simulating random walks with reweighting jumps enforcing the matching constraints on the association graph. Our algorithm achieves noise-robust graph matching by iteratively updating and exploiting the confidences of candidate correspondences. In a practical sense, our work is of particular importance since the real-world matching problem is made difficult by the presence of noise and outliers. Extensive and comparative experiments demonstrate that it outperforms the state-of-the-art graph matching algorithms especially in the presence of outliers and deformation. In this paper we present a new approach for establishing correspondences between sparse image features related by an unknown non-rigid mapping and corrupted by clutter and occlusion, such as points extracted from a pair of images containing a human figure in distinct poses. We formulate this matching task as an energy minimization problem by defining a complex objective function of the appearance and the spatial arrangement of the features. Optimization of this energy is an instance of graph matching, which is in general a NP-hard problem. We describe a novel graph matching optimization technique, which we refer to as dual decomposition (DD), and demonstrate on a variety of examples that this method outperforms existing graph matching algorithms. In the majority of our examples DD is able to find the global minimum within a minute. The ability to globally optimize the objective allows us to accurately learn the parameters of our matching model from training examples. We show on several matching tasks that our learned model yields results superior to those of state-of-the-art methods. Graph matching is a powerful tool for computer vision and machine learning. In this paper, a novel approach to graph matching is developed based on the sequential Monte Carlo framework. By constructing a sequence of intermediate target distributions, the proposed algorithm sequentially performs a sampling and importance resampling to maximize the graph matching objective. Through the sequential sampling procedure, the algorithm effectively collects potential matches under one-to-one matching constraints to avoid the adverse effect of outliers and deformation. Experimental evaluations on synthetic graphs and real images demonstrate its higher robustness to deformation and outliers.