Evolutionary algorithm for dense pixel matching in presence of distortions

Abstract

Dense pixel matching is an essential step required by many computer vision applications. While a large body of work has addressed quite successfully the rectified scenario, accurate pixel correspondence between an image and a distorted version remains very challenging. Exploiting an analogy between sequences of genetic material and images, we propose a novel genetics inspired algorithm where image variability is treated as the product of a set of image mutations. As a consequence, correspondence for each scanline of the initial image is formulated as the optimisation of a path in the second image minimising a fitness function penalising mutations. This optimisation is performed by a evolutionary algorithm which, in addition to provide fast convergence, implicitly ensures consistency between successive scanlines. Performance evaluation on locally and globally distorted images validates our bio-inspired approach.