Efficient Feature Matching by Progressive Candidate Search
This work addresses feature matching for computer vision applications like 3D reconstruction, offering incremental improvements in accuracy and efficiency.
The paper tackled the problem of feature matching in challenging scenes with repetitive patterns or large viewpoint changes by proposing a novel algorithm that uses geometric properties and a progressive MRF approach, resulting in more matches with higher inlier ratio and lower computational cost than state-of-the-art methods.
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.