Image registration by using a descriptor for repetitive patterns

This paper proposes a new feature-based image registration method based on the description of feature clusters. This method can find larger number of correspondences than the conventional methods using singleton feature descriptors, which often fail in repetitive patterns. The reason for the failure of conventional methods in a repeating pattern is due to the existence of too many similar features, which in turn gives geometrically inconsistent matching or do not survive ratio test. Hence the proposed method follows the strategy that first separate the similar features from the repetitive patterns from the others. Then the similar features in a pattern are grouped into a set that is described by a support vector descriptor in terms of the cluster´s center and radius. Once the same pattern in different images are matched, the geometric cue is added to find many geometrically consistent correspondences of the features. In the experiments, it has been demonstrated that the larger number of geometrically consistent correspondences from the repetitive pattern give more accurate registration, and thus more pleasing results in image stitching and panoramic image generation.