Two-frame wide baseline matching

Abstract

We describe a novel approach to automatically recover corresponding feature points and epipolar geometry over two wide baseline frames. Our contributions consist of several aspects: First, the use of an affine invariant feature, edge-corner, is introduced to provide a robust and consistent matching primitives. Second, based on SVD decomposition of affine matrix, the affine matching space between two corners can be approximately divided into two independent spaces by rotation angle and scaling factor. Employing this property, a two-stage affine matching algorithm is designed to obtain robust matches over two frames. Third, using the epipolar geometry estimated by these matches, more corresponding feature points are determined. Based on these robust correspondences, the fundamental matrix is refined, and a series of virtual views of the scene are synthesized. Finally, several experiments are presented to illustrate that a number of robust correspondences can be stably determined for two wide baseline images under significant camera motions with illumination changes, occlusions, and self-similarities. After testing a number of examples and comparing with the existing methods, the experimental results strongly demonstrate that our matching method outperforms the state-of-art algorithms for all of the test cases.