Feature Matching via Topology-Aware Graph Interaction Model

Feature matching plays a key role in computer vision. However, due to the limitations of the descriptors, the putative matches are inevitably contaminated by massive outliers.This paper attempts to tackle the outlier filtering problem from two aspects. First, a robust and efficient graph interaction model,is proposed, with the assumption that matches are correlated with each other rather than independently distributed. To this end, we construct a graph based on the local relationships of matches and formulate the outlier filtering task as a binary labeling energy minimization problem, where the pairwise term encodes the interaction between matches. We further show that this formulation can be solved globally by graph cut algorithm. Our new formulation always improves the performance of previous localitybased method without noticeable deterioration in processing time,adding a few milliseconds. Second, to construct a better graph structure, a robust and geometrically meaningful topology-aware relationship is developed to capture the topology relationship between matches. The two components in sum lead to topology interaction matching(TIM), an effective and efficient method for outlier filtering. Extensive experiments on several large and diverse datasets for multiple vision tasks including general feature matching, as well as relative pose estimation, homography and fundamental matrix estimation, loop-closure detection, and multi-modal image matching, demonstrate that our TIM is more competitive than current state-of-the-art methods, in terms of generality, efficiency, and effectiveness. The source code is publicly available at http://github.com/YifanLu2000/TIM.

CMMCAN:Lightweight Feature Extraction and Matching Network for Endoscopic Images Based on Adaptive Attention

In minimally invasive surgery,endoscopes or laparoscopes equipped with miniature cameras and tools are used to enter the human body for therapeutic purposes through small incisions or natural cavities.However,in clinical operating environments,endoscopic images often suffer from challenges such as low texture,uneven illumination,and non-rigid structures,which affect feature observation and extraction.This can severely impact surgical navigation or clinical diagnosis due to missing feature points in endoscopic images,leading to treatment and postoperative recovery issues for patients.To address these challenges,this paper introduces,for the first time,a Cross-Channel Multi-Modal Adaptive Spatial Feature Fusion(ASFF)module based on the lightweight architecture of EfficientViT.Additionally,a novel lightweight feature extraction and matching network based on attention mechanism is proposed.This network dynamically adjusts attention weights for cross-modal information from grayscale images and optical flow images through a dual-branch Siamese network.It extracts static and dynamic information features ranging from low-level to high-level,and from local to global,ensuring robust feature extraction across different widths,noise levels,and blur scenarios.Global and local matching are performed through a multi-level cascaded attention mechanism,with cross-channel attention introduced to simultaneously extract low-level and high-level features.Extensive ablation experiments and comparative studies are conducted on the HyperKvasir,EAD,M2caiSeg,CVC-ClinicDB,and UCL synthetic datasets.Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed network improves upon the baseline EfficientViT-B3 model by 75.4%in accuracy(Acc),while also enhancing runtime performance and storage efficiency.When compared with the complex DenseDescriptor feature extraction network,the difference in Acc is less than 7.22%,and IoU calculation results on specific datasets outperform complex dense models.Furthermore,this method increases the F1 score by 33.2%and accelerates runtime by 70.2%.It is noteworthy that the speed of CMMCAN surpasses that of comparative lightweight models,with feature extraction and matching performance comparable to existing complex models but with faster speed and higher cost-effectiveness.

Ground target localization of unmanned aerial vehicle based on scene matching

In order to improve target localization precision,accuracy,execution efficiency,and application range of the unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)based on scene matching,a ground target localization method for unmanned aerial vehicle based on scene matching(GTLUAVSM)is proposed.The sugges-ted approach entails completing scene matching through a feature matching algorithm.Then,multi-sensor registration is optimized by robust estimation based on homologous registration.Finally,basemap generation and model solution are utilized to improve basemap correspondence and accom-plish aerial image positioning.Theoretical evidence and experimental verification demonstrate that GTLUAVSM can improve localization accuracy,speed,and precision while minimizing reliance on task equipment.

Loop Closure Detection via Locality Preserving Matching With Global Consensus

A critical component of visual simultaneous localization and mapping is loop closure detection(LCD),an operation judging whether a robot has come to a pre-visited area.Concretely,given a query image(i.e.,the latest view observed by the robot),it proceeds by first exploring images with similar semantic information,followed by solving the relative relationship between candidate pairs in the 3D space.In this work,a novel appearance-based LCD system is proposed.Specifically,candidate frame selection is conducted via the combination of Superfeatures and aggregated selective match kernel(ASMK).We incorporate an incremental strategy into the vanilla ASMK to make it applied in the LCD task.It is demonstrated that this setting is memory-wise efficient and can achieve remarkable performance.To dig up consistent geometry between image pairs during loop closure verification,we propose a simple yet surprisingly effective feature matching algorithm,termed locality preserving matching with global consensus(LPM-GC).The major objective of LPM-GC is to retain the local neighborhood information of true feature correspondences between candidate pairs,where a global constraint is further designed to effectively remove false correspondences in challenging sceneries,e.g.,containing numerous repetitive structures.Meanwhile,we derive a closed-form solution that enables our approach to provide reliable correspondences within only a few milliseconds.The performance of the proposed approach has been experimentally evaluated on ten publicly available and challenging datasets.Results show that our method can achieve better performance over the state-of-the-art in both feature matching and LCD tasks.We have released our code of LPM-GC at https://github.com/jiayi-ma/LPM-GC.

Soft Tissue Feature Tracking Based on Deep Matching Network

Research in the field ofmedical image is an important part of themedical robot to operate human organs.Amedical robot is the intersection ofmulti-disciplinary research fields,in whichmedical image is an important direction and has achieved fruitful results.In this paper,amethodof soft tissue surface feature tracking basedonadepthmatching network is proposed.This method is described based on the triangular matching algorithm.First,we construct a self-made sample set for training the depth matching network from the first N frames of speckle matching data obtained by the triangle matching algorithm.The depth matching network is pre-trained on the ORL face data set and then trained on the self-made training set.After the training,the speckle matching is carried out in the subsequent frames to obtain the speckle matching matrix between the subsequent frames and the first frame.From this matrix,the inter-frame feature matching results can be obtained.In this way,the inter-frame speckle tracking is completed.On this basis,the results of this method are compared with the matching results based on the convolutional neural network.The experimental results show that the proposed method has higher matching accuracy.In particular,the accuracy of the MNIST handwritten data set has reached more than 90%.

Efficient Scalable Template-Matching Technique for Ancient Brahmi Script Image

Analysis and recognition of ancient scripts is a challenging task as these scripts are inscribed on pillars,stones,or leaves.Optical recognition systems can help in preserving,sharing,and accelerate the study of the ancient scripts,but lack of standard dataset for such scripts is a major constraint.Although many scholars and researchers have captured and uploaded inscription images on various websites,manual searching,downloading and extraction of these images is tedious and error prone.Web search queries return a vast number of irrelevant results,and manually extracting images for a specific script is not scalable.This paper proposes a novelmultistage system to identify the specific set of script images from a large set of images downloaded from web sources.The proposed system combines the two most important pattern matching techniques-Scale Invariant Feature Transform(SIFT)and Template matching,in a sequential pipeline,and by using the key strengths of each technique,the system can discard irrelevant images while retaining a specific type of images.

Image Feature Extraction and Matching of Augmented Solar Images in Space Weather

Augmented solar images were used to research the adaptability of four representative image extraction and matching algorithms in space weather domain.These include the scale-invariant feature transform algorithm,speeded-up robust features algorithm,binary robust invariant scalable keypoints algorithm,and oriented fast and rotated brief algorithm.The performance of these algorithms was estimated in terms of matching accuracy,feature point richness,and running time.The experiment result showed that no algorithm achieved high accuracy while keeping low running time,and all algorithms are not suitable for image feature extraction and matching of augmented solar images.To solve this problem,an improved method was proposed by using two-frame matching to utilize the accuracy advantage of the scale-invariant feature transform algorithm and the speed advantage of the oriented fast and rotated brief algorithm.Furthermore,our method and the four representative algorithms were applied to augmented solar images.Our application experiments proved that our method achieved a similar high recognition rate to the scale-invariant feature transform algorithm which is significantly higher than other algorithms.Our method also obtained a similar low running time to the oriented fast and rotated brief algorithm,which is significantly lower than other algorithms.

FeatureMatching Combining Variable Velocity Model with Reverse Optical Flow

The ORB-SLAM2 based on the constant velocity model is difficult to determine the search window of the reprojection of map points when the objects are in variable velocity motion,which leads to a false matching,with an inaccurate pose estimation or failed tracking.To address the challenge above,a new method of feature point matching is proposed in this paper,which combines the variable velocity model with the reverse optical flow method.First,the constant velocity model is extended to a new variable velocity model,and the expanded variable velocity model is used to provide the initial pixel shifting for the reverse optical flow method.Then the search range of feature points is accurately determined according to the results of the reverse optical flow method,thereby improving the accuracy and reliability of feature matching,with strengthened interframe tracking effects.Finally,we tested on TUM data set based on the RGB-D camera.Experimental results show that this method can reduce the probability of tracking failure and improve localization accuracy on SLAM(Simultaneous Localization and Mapping)systems.Compared with the traditional ORB-SLAM2,the test error of this method on each sequence in the TUM data set is significantly reduced,and the root mean square error is only 63.8%of the original system under the optimal condition.

Outliers rejection in similar image matching

Background Image matching is crucial in numerous computer vision tasks such as 3D reconstruction and simultaneous visual localization and mapping.The accuracy of the matching significantly impacted subsequent studies.Because of their local similarity,when image pairs contain comparable patterns but feature pairs are positioned differently,incorrect recognition can occur as global motion consistency is disregarded.Methods This study proposes an image-matching filtering algorithm based on global motion consistency.It can be used as a subsequent matching filter for the initial matching results generated by other matching algorithms based on the principle of motion smoothness.A particular matching algorithm can first be used to perform the initial matching;then,the rotation and movement information of the global feature vectors are combined to effectively identify outlier matches.The principle is that if the matching result is accurate,the feature vectors formed by any matched point should have similar rotation angles and moving distances.Thus,global motion direction and global motion distance consistencies were used to reject outliers caused by similar patterns in different locations.Results Four datasets were used to test the effectiveness of the proposed method.Three datasets with similar patterns in different locations were used to test the results for similar images that could easily be incorrectly matched by other algorithms,and one commonly used dataset was used to test the results for the general image-matching problem.The experimental results suggest that the proposed method is more accurate than other state-of-the-art algorithms in identifying mismatches in the initial matching set.Conclusions The proposed outlier rejection matching method can significantly improve the matching accuracy for similar images with locally similar feature pairs in different locations and can provide more accurate matching results for subsequent computer vision tasks.

Adaptive Recurrent Iterative Updating Stereo Matching Network

When training a stereo matching network with a single training dataset, the network may overly rely on the learned features of the single training dataset due to differences in the training dataset scenes, resulting in poor performance on all datasets. Therefore, feature consistency between matched pixels is a key factor in solving the network’s generalization ability. To address this issue, this paper proposed a more widely applicable stereo matching network that introduced whitening loss into the feature extraction module of stereo matching, and significantly improved the applicability of the network model by constraining the variation between salient feature pixels. In addition, this paper used a GRU iterative update module in the disparity update calculation stage, which expanded the model’s receptive field at multiple resolutions, allowing for precise disparity estimation not only in rich texture areas but also in low texture areas. The model was trained only on the Scene Flow large-scale dataset, and the disparity estimation was conducted on mainstream datasets such as Middlebury, KITTI 2015, and ETH3D. Compared with earlier stereo matching algorithms, this method not only achieves more accurate disparity estimation but also has wider applicability and stronger robustness.

ANTI-ROTATION AND ANTI-SCALE IMAGE MATCHING ALGORITHM FOR NAVIGATION SYSTEM

Based on the inertial navigation system, the influences of the excursion of the inertial navigation system and the measurement error of the wireless pressure altimeter on the rotation and scale of the real image are quantitatively analyzed in scene matching. The log-polar transform （LPT） is utilized and an anti-rotation and anti- scale image matching algorithm is proposed based on the image edge feature point extraction. In the algorithm, the center point is combined with its four-neighbor points, and the corresponding computing process is put forward. Simulation results show that in the image rotation and scale variation range resulted from the navigation system error and the measurement error of the wireless pressure altimeter, the proposed image matching algo- rithm can satisfy the accuracy demands of the scene aided navigation system and provide the location error-correcting information of the system.

Surface reconstruction of complex contour lines based on chain code matching technique

A new method for solving the tiling problem of surface reconstruction is proposed. The proposed method uses a snake algorithm to segment the original images, the contours are then transformed into strings by Freeman＇ s code. Symbolic string matching technique is applied to establish a correspondence between the two consecutive contours. The surface is composed of the pieces reconstructed from the correspondence points. Experimental results show that the proposed method exhibits a good behavior for the quality of surface reconstruction and its time complexity is proportional to mn where m and n are the numbers of vertices of the two consecutive slices, respectively.

Spectral matching algorithm based on nonsubsampled contourlet transform and scale-invariant feature transform

A new spectral matching algorithm is proposed by us- ing nonsubsampled contourlet transform and scale-invariant fea- ture transform. The nonsubsampled contourlet transform is used to decompose an image into a low frequency image and several high frequency images, and the scale-invariant feature transform is employed to extract feature points from the low frequency im- age. A proximity matrix is constructed for the feature points of two related images. By singular value decomposition of the proximity matrix, a matching matrix （or matching result） reflecting the match- ing degree among feature points is obtained. Experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm can reduce time complexity and possess a higher accuracy.

A Sequence Image Matching Method Based on Improved High-Dimensional Combined Features

Image matching technology is theoretically significant and practically promising in the field of autonomous navigation.Addressing shortcomings of existing image matching navigation technologies,the concept of high-dimensional combined feature is presented based on sequence image matching navigation.To balance between the distribution of high-dimensional combined features and the shortcomings of the only use of geometric relations,we propose a method based on Delaunay triangulation to improve the feature,and add the regional characteristics of the features together with their geometric characteristics.Finally,k-nearest neighbor(KNN)algorithm is adopted to optimize searching process.Simulation results show that the matching can be realized at the rotation angle of-8°to 8°and the scale factor of 0.9 to 1.1,and when the image size is 160 pixel×160 pixel,the matching time is less than 0.5 s.Therefore,the proposed algorithm can substantially reduce computational complexity,improve the matching speed,and exhibit robustness to the rotation and scale changes.

Modified SIFT descriptor and key-point matching for fast and robust image mosaic

To improve the performance of the scale invariant feature transform （ SIFT）, a modified SIFT （M-SIFT） descriptor is proposed to realize fast and robust key-point extraction and matching. In descriptor generation, 3 rotation-invariant concentric-ring grids around the key-point location are used instead of 16 square grids used in the original SIFT. Then, 10 orientations are accumulated for each grid, which results in a 30-dimension descriptor. In descriptor matching, rough rejection mismatches is proposed based on the difference of grey information between matching points. The per- formance of the proposed method is tested for image mosaic on simulated and real-worid images. Experimental results show that the M-SIFT descriptor inherits the SIFT＇ s ability of being invariant to image scale and rotation, illumination change and affine distortion. Besides the time cost of feature extraction is reduced by 50% compared with the original SIFT. And the rough rejection mismatches can reject at least 70% of mismatches. The results also demonstrate that the performance of the pro- posed M-SIFT method is superior to other improved SIFT methods in speed and robustness.

Image matching algorithm based on SIFT using color and exposure information

Image matching based on scale invariant feature transform（SIFT） is one of the most popular image matching algorithms, which exhibits high robustness and accuracy. Grayscale images rather than color images are generally used to get SIFT descriptors in order to reduce the complexity. The regions which have a similar grayscale level but different hues tend to produce wrong matching results in this case. Therefore, the loss of color information may result in decreasing of matching ratio. An image matching algorithm based on SIFT is proposed, which adds a color offset and an exposure offset when converting color images to grayscale images in order to enhance the matching ratio. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively differentiate the regions with different colors but the similar grayscale level, and increase the matching ratio of image matching based on SIFT. Furthermore, it does not introduce much complexity than the traditional SIFT.

A fast, accurate and dense feature matching algorithm for aerial images

Three-dimensional(3D)reconstruction based on aerial images has broad prospects,and feature matching is an important step of it.However,for high-resolution aerial images,there are usually problems such as long time,mismatching and sparse feature pairs using traditional algorithms.Therefore,an algorithm is proposed to realize fast,accurate and dense feature matching.The algorithm consists of four steps.Firstly,we achieve a balance between the feature matching time and the number of matching pairs by appropriately reducing the image resolution.Secondly,to realize further screening of the mismatches,a feature screening algorithm based on similarity judgment or local optimization is proposed.Thirdly,to make the algorithm more widely applicable,we combine the results of different algorithms to get dense results.Finally,all matching feature pairs in the low-resolution images are restored to the original images.Comparisons between the original algorithms and our algorithm show that the proposed algorithm can effectively reduce the matching time,screen out the mismatches,and improve the number of matches.

Speeded-Up Robust Feature Matching Algorithm Based on Image Improvement Technology

Due to requirements and necessities in digital image research, image matching is considered as a key, essential and complicating point especially for machine learning. According to its convenience and facility, the most applied algorithm for image feature point extraction and matching is Speeded-Up Robust Feature (SURF). The enhancement for scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) algorithm promotes the effectiveness of the algorithm as well as facilitates the possibility, while the application of the algorithm is being applied in a present time computer vision system. In this research work, the aim of SURF algorithm is to extract image features, and we have incorporated RANSAC algorithm to filter matching points. The images were juxtaposed and asserted experiments utilizing pertinent image improvement methods. The idea based on merging improvement technology through SURF algorithm is put forward to get better quality of feature points matching the efficiency and appropriate image improvement methods are adopted for different feature images which are compared and verified by experiments. Some results have been explained there which are the effects of lighting on the underexposed and overexposed images.

Image Relaxation Matching Based on Feature Points for DSM Generation

In photogrammetry and remote sensing, image matching is a basic and crucial process for automatic DEM generation. In this paper we presented a image relaxation matching method based on feature points. This method can be considered as an extention of regular grid point based matching. It avoids the shortcome of grid point based matching. For example, with this method, we can avoid low or even no texture area where errors frequently appear in cross correlaton matching. In the mean while, it makes full use of some mature techniques such as probability relaxation, image pyramid and the like which have already been successfully used in grid point matching process. Application of the technique to DEM generaton in different regions proved that it is more reasonable and reliable.

A Fast Image Matching Algorithm Using a Combination of Line Segment Features

The scene matching navigation is a research focus in the field of autonomous navigation,but the real-time performance of image matching algorithm is difficult to meet the needs of real navigation systems.Therefore,this paper proposes a fast image matching algorithm.The algorithm improves the traditional line segment extraction algorithm and combines with the Delaunay triangulation method.By combining the geometric features of points and lines,the image feature redundancy is reduced.Then,the error with confidence criterion is analyzed and the matching process is completed.The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can still work within 3°rotation and small scale variation.In addition,the matching time is less than 0.5 s when the image size is 256 pixel×256 pixel.The proposed algorithm is suitable for autonomous navigation systems with multiple feature distribution and higher real-time requirements.