Global propagation of affine invariant features for robust matching

Local invariant features have been successfully used in image matching to cope with viewpoint change, partial occlusion, and clutters. However, when these factors become too strong, there will be a lot of mismatches due to the limited repeatability and discriminative power of features. In this paper, we present an efficient approach to remove the false matches and propagate the correct ones for the affine invariant features which represent the state-of-the-art local invariance. First, a pair-wise affine consistency measure is proposed to evaluate the consensus of the matches of affine invariant regions. The measure takes into account both the keypoint location and the region shape, size, and orientation. Based on this measure, a geometric filter is then presented which can efficiently remove the outliers from the initial matches, and is robust to severe clutters and non-rigid deformation. To increase the correct matches, we propose a global match refinement and propagation method that simultaneously finds a optimal group of local affine transforms to relate the features in two images. The global method is capable of producing a quasi-dense set of matches even for the weakly textured surfaces that suffer strong rigid transformation or non-rigid deformation. The strong capability of the proposed method in dealing with significant viewpoint change, non-rigid deformation, and low-texture objects is demonstrated in experiments of image matching, object recognition, and image based rendering.