A Robust Appearance Model and Similarity Measure for Image Matching

CP3 histogramAn ideal similarity measure for matching image should be discriminative, producing a conspicuous correlation peak and suppressing false local maxima. Image matching tasks in practice, however, often involves complex conditions, such as blurring and fluctuating illumination. These may cause the similarity measure to not be discriminative enough. We utilized a robust scene modeling method to model the appearance of an image and propose an associated similarity measure for image matching. The proposed method utilizes a spatio-temporal learning stage to select a group of supporting pixels for each target pixel, then builds a differential statistic model of them to describe the uniqueness of the spatial structure and to provide illumination invariance for robust matching. We utilized this method for image matching in several challenging environments. Experimental results show that the proposed similarity measure produces explicit correlation peaks to achieve robust image matching.