Virtual Line Descriptor and Semi-Local Matching Method for Reliable Feature Correspondence

International audienceFinding reliable correspondences between sets of feature points in two images remains challenging in case of ambiguities or strong transformations. In this paper, we define a photometric descriptor for virtual lines that join neighbouring feature points. We show that it can be used in the second-order term of existing graph matchers to significantly improve their accuracy. We also define a semi-local matching method based on this descriptor. We show that it is robust to strong transformations and more accurate than existing graph matchers for scenes with significant occlusions, including for very low inlier rates. Used as a preprocessor to filter outliers from match candidates, it significantly improves the robustness of RANSAC and reduces camera calibration errors

An Analysis of Errors in Graph-Based Keypoint Matching and Proposed Solutions

International audienceAn error occurs in graph-based keypoint matching when key-points in two different images are matched by an algorithm but do not correspond to the same physical point. Most previous methods acquire keypoints in a black-box manner, and focus on developing better algorithms to match the provided points. However to study the complete performance of a matching system one has to study errors through the whole matching pipeline, from keypoint detection, candidate selection to graph optimisation. We show that in the full pipeline there are six different types of errors that cause mismatches. We then present a matching framework designed to reduce these errors. We achieve this by adapting keypoint detectors to better suit the needs of graph-based matching, and achieve better graph constraints by exploiting more information from their keypoints. Our framework is applicable in general images and can handle clutter and motion discontinuities. We also propose a method to identify many mismatches a posteriori based on Left-Right Consistency inspired by stereo matching due to the asymmetric way we detect keypoints and define the graph

Efficient and Scalable 4-th order Match Propagation

International audienceWe propose a robust method to match image feature points taking into account geometric consistency. It is a careful adaptation of the match propagation principle to 4th-order geometric constraints (match quadruple consistency). With our method, a set of matches is explained by a network of locally-similar affinities. This approach is useful when simple descriptor-based matching strategies fail, in particular for highly ambiguous data, e.g., with repetitive patterns or where texture is lacking. As it scales easily to hundreds of thousands of matches, it is also useful when denser point distributions are sought, e.g., for high-precision rigid model estimation. Experiments show that our method is competitive (efficient, scalable, accurate, robust) against state-of-the-art methods in deformable object matching, camera calibration and pattern detection

Graph similarity through entropic manifold alignment

In this paper we decouple the problem of measuring graph similarity into two sequential steps. The first step is the linearization of the quadratic assignment problem (QAP) in a low-dimensional space, given by the embedding trick. The second step is the evaluation of an information-theoretic distributional measure, which relies on deformable manifold alignment. The proposed measure is a normalized conditional entropy, which induces a positive definite kernel when symmetrized. We use bypass entropy estimation methods to compute an approximation of the normalized conditional entropy. Our approach, which is purely topological (i.e., it does not rely on node or edge attributes although it can potentially accommodate them as additional sources of information) is competitive with state-of-the-art graph matching algorithms as sources of correspondence-based graph similarity, but its complexity is linear instead of cubic (although the complexity of the similarity measure is quadratic). We also determine that the best embedding strategy for graph similarity is provided by commute time embedding, and we conjecture that this is related to its inversibility property, since the inverse of the embeddings obtained using our method can be used as a generative sampler of graph structure.The work of the first and third authors was supported by the projects TIN2012-32839 and TIN2015-69077-P of the Spanish Government. The work of the second author was supported by a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award