Research on feature point matching algorithm improvement using depth prediction

Feature point matching plays an important role in feature‐based image registration such as the scale‐invariant feature transform algorithm. Feature‐based image registration is widely used in visual simultaneous localisation and mapping, augmented reality, self‐driving etc. The most meaningful study on feature matching is to improve the accuracy and efficiency and this study pays attention to improving the accuracy by removing the mismatching feature points. Since most of the existed feature‐based image registration algorithms are not so strong and efficient enough in mismatch removing, in this study, the authors propose a novel mismatch removal algorithm by incorporating depth prediction into feature matching to improve the performance. In this approach, the depth maps are predicted in pixel‐wise through the given red–green–blue images using a deep learning algorithm. Experimental results show that their method outperforms conventional ones in mismatch removing.