Feature transfer and matching in disparate stereo views through the use of plane homographies

Many vision tasks rely upon the identification of sets of corresponding features among different images. This paper presents a method that, given some corresponding features in two stereo images, matches them with features extracted from a second stereo pair captured from a distant viewpoint. The proposed method is based on the assumption that the viewed scene contains two planar surfaces and exploits geometric constraints that are imposed by the existence of these planes to first transfer and then match image features between the two stereo pairs. The resulting scheme handles point and line features in a unified manner and is capable of successfully matching features extracted from stereo pairs that are acquired from considerably different viewpoints. Experimental results are presented, which demonstrate that the performance of the proposed method compares favorably to that of epipolar and tensor-based approaches.