Learning Relaxed Neighborhood Consistency for Feature Matching

Abstract

Feature matching is a critical prerequisite in many applications of remote sensing, and its aim is to establish reliable correspondences between two sets of features. Existing attempts typically involve estimating the underlying image transformations to remove false matches in putative matches. However, the image transformation could vary with different application scenarios, which means that using a predefined geometrical model may lead to inferior matching accuracy, especially if the image transformation is nonrigid. This article casts the mismatch removal into a neighborhood consistency evaluation problem under a customized learning framework. With only seven training image pairs involving approximately 8000 putative matches, our method can handle different types of images or transformation models (affine, homography, piecewise-linear transformation, and others). Extensive experiments on feature matching and image registration are conducted to demonstrate the superiority of our method over the eight state-of-the-art competitors.