Authors:
Luke Palmer
1
and
Tilo Burghardt
2
Affiliations:
1
The Institute of Cognitive Neuoscience and University College London, United Kingdom
;
2
The Visual Information Laboratory and University of Bristol, United Kingdom
Keyword(s):
Point-matching, Saliency, Registration, Recognition, Non-rigid, Biometrics, Regularity.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Computer Vision, Visualization and Computer Graphics
;
Image and Video Analysis
;
Image Registration
;
Shape Representation and Matching
;
Visual Attention and Image Saliency
Abstract:
In this paper we develop a method for injecting within-pattern information into the matching of point patterns through utilising the shape context descriptor in a novel manner. In the domain of visual animal biometrics, landmark distributions on animal coats are commonly used as characteristic features in the pursuit of individual identification and are often derived by imaging surface entities such as bifurcations in scales, fur colouring, or skin ridge minutiae. However, many natural distributions of landmarks are quasiregular, a property with which state-of-the-art registration algorithms have difficulty. The method presented here addresses the issue by guiding matching along the most distinctive points within a set based on a measure we term contextual saliency. Experiments on synthetic data are reported which show the contextual saliency measure to be tolerant of many point-set transformations and predictive of correct correspondence. A general point-matching algorithm is then d
eveloped which combines contextual saliency information with naturalistic structural constraints in the form of the thin-plate spline. When incorporated as part of a recognition system, the presented algorithm is shown to outperform two widely used point-matching algorithms on a real-world manta ray data set.
(More)