Multi-Scale Memetic Image Registration

Abstract

Many technological applications of our time rely on images captured by multiple cameras. Such applications include the detection and recognition of objects in captured images, the tracking of objects and analysis of their motion, and the detection of changes in appearance. The alignment of images captured at different times and/or from different angles is a key processing step in these applications. One of the most challenging tasks is to develop fast algorithms to accurately align images perturbed by various types of transformations. The paper reports a new method used to register images in the case of geometric perturbations that include rotations, translations, and non-uniform scaling. The input images can be monochrome or colored, and they are preprocessed by a noise-insensitive edge detector to obtain binarized versions. Isotropic scaling transformations are used to compute multi-scale representations of the binarized inputs. The algorithm is of memetic type and exploits the fact that the computation carried out in reduced representations usually produces promising initial solutions very fast. The proposed method combines bio-inspired and evolutionary computation techniques with clustered search and implements a procedure specially tailored to address the premature convergence issue in various scaled representations. A long series of tests on perturbed images were performed, evidencing the efficiency of our memetic multi-scale approach. In addition, a comparative analysis has proved that the proposed algorithm outperforms some well-known registration procedures both in terms of accuracy and runtime.