Robust feature matching in the wild

Abstract

Finding corresponding key points in images from security camera videos is challenging. Images are generally low quality and acquired in uncontrolled conditions with visual distortions caused by weather, crowded scenes, emergency lighting or the high angle of the camera mounting. We describe a methodology to match features between images that performs especially well with real-world images. We introduce a novel blur sensitive feature detection method, a combinatorial feature descriptor and a distance calculation that efficiently unites texture and colour attributes to discriminate feature correspondence in low quality images. Our methods are tested by performing key point matching on real-world security images such as outdoor CCTV videos, and we demonstrate an improvement in the ability to match features between images compared with the standard feature descriptors extracted from the same set of feature points. We use key point features from Harris Corners, SIFT, SURF, BRISK and FAST as well as MSER and MSCR region detectors to provide a comprehensive analysis of our generic method. We demonstrate feature matching using a 138-dimensional descriptor that improves the matching performance of a state-of-the-art 384-dimension colour descriptor with just 40% of the storage requirements.