Combining Extremal Optimization With Singular Value Decomposition For Effective Point Matching

Feature point matching is a key step for most problems in computer vision. It is an ill-posed problem and suffers from combinatorial complexity which becomes even more critical with the increase in data and the presence of outliers. The work covered in this paper describes a new framework to solve this problem in order to achieve robust registration of two feature point sets assumed to be available. This framework combines the use of extremal optimization heuristic with a clever startup routine which exploits some properties of singular value decomposition. The role of the latter is to produce an interesting matching configuration whereas the role of the former is to refine the initial matching by generating hypothetical matches and outliers using a far-from-equilibrium based stochastic rule. Experiments on a wide range of real data have shown the effectiveness of the proposed method and its ability to achieve reliable feature point matching.