Bi-directional Shape Correspondences (BSC): A Novel Technique for 2-d Shape Warping in Quadratic Time?
This work addresses a computational bottleneck in shape matching for computer vision applications, offering a more efficient solution.
The paper tackles the problem of computing many-to-many correspondences for 2D shape warping by proposing Bidirectional Shape Correspondence (BSC), which achieves this in quadratic time, improving upon existing methods that require cubic or quintic time.
We propose Bidirectional Shape Correspondence (BSC) as a possible improvement on the famous shape contexts (SC) framework. Our proposals derive from the observation that the SC framework enforces a one-to-one correspondence between sample points, and that this leads to two possible drawbacks. First, this denies the framework the opportunity to effect advantageous many-to-many matching between points on the two shapes being compared. Second, this calls for the Hungarian algorithm which unfortunately usurps cubic time. While the dynamic-space-warping dynamic programming algorithm has provided a standard solution to the first problem above, it demands quintic time for general multi-contour shapes, and w times quadratic time for the special case of single-contour shapes, even after an heuristic search window of width w has been chosen. Therefore, in this work, we propose a simple method for computing "many-to-many" correspondences for the class of all 2-d shapes in quadratic time. Our approach is to explicitly let each point on the first shape choose a best match on the second shape, and vice versa. Along the way, we also propose the use of data-clustering techniques for dealing with the outliers problem, and, from another viewpoint, it turns out that this clustering can be seen as an autonomous, rather than pre-computed, sampling of shape boundary.