Multispectral Interest Points for RGB-NIR Image Registration

This paper explores the use of joint colour and near-infrared (NIR) information for feature based matching and image registration. In particular, we investigate multispectral generalisations of two popular interest point detectors (Harris and difference of Gaussians), and show that these give a marked improvement in performance when the extra NIR channel is available. We also look at the problem of multimodal RGB to NIR registration, and propose a variant of the SIFT descriptor that gives improved performance

Semantic Image Segmentation Using Visible and Near-Infrared Channels

Recent progress in computational photography has shown that we can acquire physical information beyond visible (RGB) image representations. In particular, we can acquire near-infrared (NIR) cues with only slight modification to any standard digital camera. In this paper, we study whether this extra channel can improve semantic image segmentation. Based on a state-of-the-art segmentation framework and a novel manually segmented image database that contains 4-channel images (RGB+NIR), we study how to best incorporate the specific characteristics of the NIR response. We show that it leads to improved performances for 7 classes out of 10 in the proposed dataset and discuss the results with respect to the physical properties of the NIR response