NCC Based Correspondence Problem for First- and Second-Order Graph Matching †

Automatically finding correspondences between object features in images is of main interest for several applications, as object detection and tracking, identification, registration, and many derived tasks. In this paper, we address feature correspondence within the general framework of graph matching optimization and with the principal aim to contribute. We proposed two optimized algorithms: first-order and second-order for graph matching. On the one hand, a first-order normalized cross-correlation (NCC) based graph matching algorithm using entropy and response through Marr wavelets within the scale-interaction method is proposed. First, we proposed a new automatic feature detection processing by using Marr wavelets within the scale-interaction method. Second, feature extraction is executed under the mesh division strategy and entropy algorithm, accompanied by the assessment of the distribution criterion. Image matching is achieved by the nearest neighbor search with normalized cross-correlation similarity measurement to perform coarse matching on feature points set. As to the matching points filtering part, the Random Sample Consensus Algorithm (RANSAC) removes outliers correspondences. One the other hand, a second-order NCC based graph matching algorithm is presented. This algorithm is an integer quadratic programming (IQP) graph matching problem, which is implemented in Matlab. It allows developing and comparing many algorithms based on a common evaluation platform, sharing input data, and a customizable affinity matrix and matching list of candidate solution pairs as input data. Experimental results demonstrate the improvements of these algorithms concerning matching recall and accuracy compared with other algorithms.