Recovering planar homographies between 2D shapes

Images taken from different views of a planar object are related by planar homography. Recovering the parameters of such transformations is a fundamental problem in computer vision with various applications. This paper proposes a novel method to estimate the parameters of a homography that aligns two binary images. It is obtained by solving a system of nonlinear equations generated by integrating linearly independent functions over the domains determined by the shapes. The advantage of the proposed solution is that it is easy to implement, less sensitive to the strength of the deformation, works without established correspondences and robust against segmentation errors. The method has been tested on synthetic as well as on real images and its efficiency has been demonstrated in the context of two different applications: alignment of hip prosthesis X-ray images and matching of traffic signs.