Robust line feature matching based on pair-wise geometric constraints and matching redundancy

Abstract This paper presents a novel method for matching line segments in images based on pair-wise geometric constraints and matching redundancy. In this study, pairs of line segments satisfying angle and distance constraints are used as matching primitives. To ensure that each extracted line segment is paired with another line segment, the search region of each line segment is gradually grown until it is paired. Initial pair-to-pair correspondences between two images are established using four pair-wise constraints; next, line-to-line correspondences are obtained. To effectively solve the matching conflict in the results, a method of recording the result of line pair matching based on a double-layer matrix is proposed. Based on the double-layer matrix, an effective checking method for the line matching results based on the collinearity constraint and matching redundancy is presented. It fully utilizes redundancy information and considers the collinearity of fragmented line segments. Further, it can effectively separate correct and incorrect matches from the one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many matching results. The proposed method was tested on 12 image pairs from a benchmark of matched-lines, and compared with other state-of-the-art methods. The results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method due to its higher accuracy and greater recall in challenging cases.