Interest Points of General Imbalance

The imbalance oriented selection scheme was recently introduced to detect stable interest points in weakly or sparsely textured images. The scheme chooses image points whose one-pixel-wide directional intensity variations can be clustered into two imbalanced classes as candidates. An important property of imbalance oriented selection is that imbalanced points can be contiguous to others, i.e., imbalanced points have local geometry coherent property. In this paper, we propose general imbalance decided by multipixel-wide directional intensity variations. We give a theoretical analysis on a relation between imbalance and general imbalance. In terms of the local geometry coherent property of general imbalanced points, we propose a global-to-local appearance based matching scheme for imbalanced point correspondence. Last, we present an application of general imbalanced points to road sign detection, which demonstrates the good potential of general imbalanced points.