Robust Harris Corner Matching Based on the Quasi-Homography Transform and Self-Adaptive Window for Wide-Baseline Stereo Images

Abstract

Corner feature matching remains a difficult task for wide-baseline images because of viewpoint distortion, surface discontinuities, and partial occlusions. In this paper, we propose a robust Harris corner matching method based on the quasi-homography transform (QHT) and self-adaptive window. Our method is divided into three steps. First, high-quality Harris corners were extracted from stereo images using optimal detecting, and initial matches were simultaneously acquired by integrating complementary affine-invariant features and the scale-invariant feature transform descriptor. Second, the pair of fundamental matrices was estimated based on the initial matches and improved random sample consensus algorithm. Subsequently, the global QHT was produced by duplicate epipolar geometries. Third, conjugate Harris corners were obtained by combining QHT and normalized cross correlation, and the accuracy of the corresponding points was further improved based on self-adaptive least-squares matching (SALSM). Experiments on six groups of wide-baseline images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, and a comprehensive comparison with the existing corner matching algorithms indicates that our method has notable superiority in terms of accuracy and distribution. The main contribution of this paper is that the proposed global QHT can reduce the search range effectively for candidates, and the proposed SALSM can notably improve the accuracy of the corresponding corners.