A Feature Point Matching Based on Spatial Order Constraints Bilateral-Neighbor Vote

Feature point matching is a fundamental and challenging problem in many computer vision applications. In this paper, a robust feature point matching algorithm named spatial order constraints bilateral-neighbor vote (SOCBV) is proposed to remove outliers for a set of matches (including outliers) between two images. A directed k nearest neighbor (knn) graph of match sets is generated, and the problem of feature point matching is formulated as a binary discrimination problem. In the discrimination process, the class labeled matrix is built via the spatial order constraints defined on the edges that connect a point to its knn. Then, the posterior inlier class probability of each match is estimated with the knn density estimation and spatial order constraints. The vote of each match is determined by averaging all posterior class probabilities that originate from its associative inliers set and is used for removing outliers. The algorithm iteratively removes outliers from the directed graph and recomputes the votes until the stopping condition is satisfied. Compared with other popular algorithms, such as RANSAC, RSOC, GTM, SOC and WGTM, experiments under various testing data sets demonstrate strong robustness for the proposed algorithm.