Local affine image matching and synthesis based on structural patterns

A general purpose block-to-block affine transformation estimator is described. The estimator is based on Fourier slice analysis and Fourier spectral alignment. It shows encouraging performance in terms of both speed and accuracy compared to existing methods. The key elements of its success are attributed to the ability to: 1) locate an arbitrary number of affine invariant points in the spectrum that latch onto significant structural features; 2) match the estimated invariant points with the target spectrum by the slicewise phase-correlation; and 3) use affine invariant points to directly compute all linear parameters of the full affine transform by spectral alignment. Experimental results using a wide range of textures are presented. Potential applications include affine invariant image segmentation, registration, affine symmetric image coding, and motion analysis.