Improving Descriptors for Fast Tree Matching by Optimal Linear Projection
Krystian Mikolajczyk, Jiřı́ Matas · 2007
In this paper we propose to transform an image descriptor so that nearest neighbor (NN) search for correspondences becomes the optimal matching strategy under the assumption that inter-image deviations of corresponding descriptors have Gaussian distribution. The Euclidean NN in the transformed domain corresponds to the NN according to a truncated Mahalanobis metric in the original descriptor space. We provide theoretical justification for the proposed approach and show experimentally that the transformation allows a significant dimensionality reduction and improves matching performance of a state-of-the art SIFT descriptor. We observe consistent improvement in precision-recall and speed of fast matching in tree structures at the expense of little overhead for projecting the descriptors into transformed space. In the context of SIFT vs. transformed M- SIFT comparison, tree search structures are evaluated according to different criteria and query types. All search tree experiments confirm that transformed M-SIFTperforms better than the original SIFT.