A novel similarity-invariant line descriptor for geometric map registration

In this paper we present a new line descriptor that can be used in the process of tracking 2D navigation maps that are low in texture details. The problem of tracking this kind of maps is very important in the development and testing phases of a navigation system. In order to track the motion of the map, which could be a translation, rotation, or scale (also known as similarity transform), line segments are used as features and are matched between two consecutive frames using the proposed descriptor in order to determine the motion between the frames. The descriptor is shown to be very robust against typical translation, rotation, and scale transformations, while requiring an acceptable processing time.