Wide-Baseline Correspondence from Locally Affine Invariant Contour Matching

This paper proposes an affine invariant contour description for contour matching, applicable to wide-baseline stereo correspondence. The contours to be matched can be either object edges or region boundaries. The contour descriptor is constructed locally using matrix theory and is invariant to affine transformations, which approximate perspective transformations in wide-baseline imaging. Contour similarity is measured in terms of the descriptor to establish initial correspondence, then new constraints of grouping, ordering and consistency for contour matching are introduced to cooperate with the epipolar constraint to reject outliers. Experiments using real-world images validate that the proposed method results in more accurate stereo correspondence for clutter scenes with large depth of field than point-based stereo matching algorithms.