of keypoint matching disregard this knowledge com-
pletely and assume the most general case in which no
prior knowledge is available whatsoever.
The goal of this paper is to propose a simple,
efficient, and accurate method to include this prior
knowledge into the task of keypoint matching. Cam-
era positions and orientations are modelled as prob-
ability density distributions from which several fixed
poses are sampled. These are combined to a set of
possible fundamental matrices. For each keypoint
of the first image each of these matrices defines one
epipolar line in the other image. An approxima-
tion of the convex envelope of these epipolar lines
defines the area in which the matching keypoint is
searched. Keypoints outside this area are not consid-
ered and do not need to be compared to the source
keypoint. If the search areas are sufficiently small
(i.e. the prior knowledge sufficiently accurate) this
approach saves computation time since considerably
less comparisons have to be carried out. Addition-
ally, the correspondence set will be much more accu-
rate since problems due to repetitive image structures
can be resolved more easily leading to less ambiguous
matches.
The results of the experimental section show that
these theoretical considerations are valid. GM leads
to superior performance with respect to quantitative
(e.g. number of valid matches) as well as qualitative
(e.g. mean Sampson error) measurements, while be-
ing also significantly faster than BFM. If the uncer-
tainty of the prior knowledge is too large, the perfor-
mance of GM saturates to BFM leading to identical
but never inferior results.
It should be noted that all optimization techniques
that are usually applied to enhance BFM methods can
equally be applied to GM. All keypoints are handled
independently which allows for parallel processing.
Since one keypoint within the first image is compared
to all keypoints within the respective search region
within the second image, ideas like tree-based data
structures etc. are equally possible.
Future work will focus on a more efficient def-
inition of search regions to reduce the overhead on
calculations. Also an easy to use but general graphi-
cal user interface will be developed to allow the user
to provide the available prior knowledge in any given
form. Last but not least the method presented in this
paper should be extended by including other types of
prior knowledge, e.g. about the 3D scene structure, to
further enhance results.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This project has been co-financed through the action
”State Scholarships Foundation’s Grants Programme
following a procedure of individualized evaluation for
the academic year 2012-2013”, from resources of the
operational program ”Education and Lifelong Learn-
ing” of the European Social Fund and the National
Strategic Reference Framework 2007-2013.
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