A hierarchical approach to the correspondence problem

An algorithm for feature-point matching using a feature-point hierarchy (edges directed by corners) is presented. Psychophysical evidence indicates that higher-level image structures, such as line segments or corners, can aid the matching of low-level structures. This observation, applied to the correspondence problem in machine vision, directly motivates the implementation of the hierarchical matcher described. In addition, edge and corner detectors developed for the matcher and based on the facet model are described. The matcher gives an accurate disparity assignment for real images and performs better than the simpler nonhierarchical relaxation matcher on which it is based