A computational approach for corner and vertex detection

Corners and vertexes are strong and useful features in computer vision for scene analysis, stereo matching, and motion analysis. Here, we deal with the development of a computational approach to these important features. We consider first a corner model and study analytically its behavior once it has been smoothed using the well-known Gaussian filter. This allows us to clarify the behavior of some well-knowncornerness measure based approaches used to detect these points of interest. Most of these classical approaches appear to detect points that do not correspond to the exact position of the corner. A new scale-space based approach that combines useful properties from the Laplacian and Beaudet's measure (Beaudet 1978) is then proposed in order to correct and detect exactly the corner position. An extension of this approach is then developed to solve the problem of trihedral vertex characterization and detection. In particular, it is shown that a trihedral vertex has two elliptic maxima on extremal contrast surfaces if the contrast is sufficient, and this allows us to classify trihedral vertexes in 2 classes: “vertex,” and “vertex as corner.” The corner-detection approach developed is applied to accurately detect trihedral vertexes using an additional test in order to make a distinction between trihedral vertexes and corners. Many experiments have been carried out using noisy synthetic data and real images containing corners and vertexes. Most of the promising results obtained are used to illustrate the experimental section of this paper.