FINDING CORRESPONDENCES

A lot of computer vision problems can be dealt with finding the correspondences between two images, The process can be described as follows

flowchart TD

A[DETECTION]
B[DESCRIPTION]
C[MATCHING]
A --> B
B --> C

Where:

  • in detection phase interesting point of an image are detected (keypoints)
  • in description phase for each keypoint a descriptor based on the neighborhood is computed
  • in the matching phase descriptors of keypoints detected from a reference image are compared against descriptors of keypoint from different images

The algorithms for the detection and description phase must have the following properties

DETECTORSDESCRIPTORS
REPEATABILITY

it should find the same keypoint in the image despite the transformations undergone by the images
DISTINCTIVENESS/ROBUSTNESS TRADE OFF

it should capture the salient information in the neighborhood of a keypoint and also avoid noise effects from change of light intensities
INTERESTINGNESS

It should find points with informative surroundings as to enable the matching process
COMPACTNESS

description should be concise as possible in order to improve the matching process

KEYPOINTS: CHOOSE THE BEST CANDIDATE

keypoints are points that contains the most information in an image, edges are bad candidates as along the perpendicular direction they are pretty similar and cannot be distinguished, points that show high variance in all directions are best suited for the purpose such as corners

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