A novel approach for affine point pattern matching

Abstract

Affine point pattern matching (APPM) is an integral part of many pattern recognition problems. Given two sets P and Q of points with unknown assignments pi → qj between the points, no additional information is available. The following task must be solved: - Find an affine transformation double struck T sign such that the distance between P and the transformed set Q′ = double struck T signQ is minimal. In this paper, we present a new approach to the APPM problem based on matching in bipartite graphs. We have proved that the minimum of a cost function is an invariant under special affine transformations. We have developed a new algorithm based on this property. Finally, we have tested the performance of the algorithm on both synthetically generated point sets and point sets extracted from real images. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.