PLAUSIBLE IMAGE MATCHING: DETERMINING DENSE AND SMOOTH MAPPING BETWEEN IMAGES WITHOUT A PRIORI KNOWLEDGE
SHUNTARO YAMAZAKI, Katsushi Ikeuchi, Yoshihisa Shinagawa · International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence · 2005
This paper presents a method for automatic determination of dense and smooth mapping between two images without a priori knowledge of either the camera pose or the objects in the images. We designed an algorithm to find the mapping between a pair of arbitrary images, and accomplish automatic image morphing. In order to extract image features which look natural to human, we use a set of linear filters similar to those that are used in early vision. Then the derived vector fields consisting of filter responses are matched with each other through a minimization of the cost function which expresses the similarity of transformed images and mapping smoothness, in a multiresolutional hierarchy. Since the cost function in general is highly nonlinear, we avoid excessive distortion in the estimated mapping by providing a local convexity of mapping in nonlinear optimization. In this paper, a variety of experimental results are discussed for various data sets, including images of rotating objects, static objects, human faces and texture patterns, to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.