Evaluation of point matching methods for wide-baseline stereo correspondence on mobile platforms

Abstract

Wide-baseline stereo matching is a common problem of computer vision. By the explosion of smartphones equipped with camera modules, many classical computer vision solutions have been adapted to such platforms. Considering the widespread use of various networking options for mobile phones, one can consider a set of smart phones as an ad-hoc camera network, where each camera is equipped with a more and more powerful computing engine in addition to a limited bandwidth communication with other devices. Therefore the performance of classical vision algorithms in a collaborative mobile environment is of particular interest. In such a scenario we expect that the images are taken almost simultaneously but from different viewpoints, implying that the camera poses are significantly different but lighting conditions are the same. In this work, we provide quantitative comparison of the most important keypoint detectors and descriptors in the context of wide baseline stereo matching. We found that for resolution of 2 megapixels images the current mobile hardware is capable of providing results efficiently.