Visible spectrum and infra-red image matching: A new method

Abstract

Textural and intensity changes between Visible Spectrum (VS) and Infra-Red (IR) images degrade the performance of feature points. We propose a new method based on a regression technique to overcome this problem. The proposed method consists of three main steps. In the first step, feature points are detected from VS-IR images and Modified Normalized (MN)-Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) descriptors are computed. In the second step, correct MN-SIFT descriptor matches are identified between VS-IR images with projection error. A regression model is trained on correct MN-SIFT descriptors. In the third step, the regression model is used to process the MN-SIFT descriptors of test VS images in order to remove misalignment with the MN-SIFT descriptors of test IR images and to overcome textural and intensity changes. Experiments are performed on two different VS-IR image datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed method works really well and demonstrates on average 14% and 15% better precision and matching scores compared to recently proposed Histograms of Directional Maps (HoDM) descriptor.