Line Matching in Wide-Baseline Stereo: A Top-Down Approach

This paper introduces a new algorithm for matching lines across images that exploit the epipolar geometry and the coplanarity constraints between pairs of lines. In contrast to common treatment in matching of interest points, we use the epipolar geometry to constrain coplanarity conditions between line-pairs. This treatment eliminates the potential matching problems due to the incomplete line observations with nonmatching endpoints. This observation is used to detect a set of candidate line-pair correspondences. These matching pairs are then verified via local homography transforms derived from the neighboring interest point correspondences. This step results in a line affinity matrix, which is processed to obtain matching lines. During this process, we do not use appearance models and show that the proposed treatment performs better than the state-of-the-art appearance and geometry-based methods, especially for images with wide-baseline.