Direct estimation of affine image deformations using visual front-end operations with automatic scale selection

• Published in: Computer Vision, 5th International Conference on (ICCV '95) pp. 134 - 141
• Main Author: Lindeberg, T.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE Comput. Soc. Press 1995
• Subjects: Brightness; Cameras; Computational modeling; Computer vision; Deformable models; Laboratories; Motion control; Motion estimation; Shape control; Stereo vision
• ISBN: 9780818670428; 0818670428
• DOI: 10.1109/ICCV.1995.466795

This article deals with the problem of estimating deformations of brightness patterns using visual front-end operations. Estimating such deformations constitutes an important subtask in several computer vision problems relating to image correspondence and shape estimation. The following subjects are treated: The problem of decomposing affine flow fields into simpler components is analysed in detail. A canonical parametrization is presented based on singular value decomposition, which naturally separates the rotationally invariant components of the flow field from the rotationally variant ones. A novel mechanism is presented for automatic selection of scale levels when estimating local affine deformations. This mechanism is expressed within a multiscale framework where disparity estimates are computed in a hierarchical coarse-to-fine manner and corrected using iterative techniques. Then, deformation estimates are selected from the scales that minimize a certain normalized residual over scales. Finally, the descriptors so obtained serve as initial data for computing refined estimates of the local deformations.< >