A Robust Mismatch Removal Method for Image Matching Based on the Fusion of the Local Features and the Depth

Abstract

Feature point matching is a fundamental task in computer vision such as vision simultaneous localization and mapping (VSLAM) and structure from motion (SFM). Due to the similarity or interference of features, mismatches are often unavoidable. Therefore, how to eliminate mismatches is important for robust matching. Smoothness constraint is widely used to remove mismatch, but it cannot effectively deal with the issue in the rapidly changing scene. In this paper, a novel LCS-SSM (Local Cell Statistics and Structural Similarity Measurement) mismatch removal method is proposed. LCS-SSM integrates the motion consistency and structural similarity of a local image block as the statistical likelihood of matched key points. Then, the Random Sampling Consensus (RANSAC) algorithm is employed to preserve the isolated matches that do not satisfy the statistical likelihood. Experimental and comparative results on the public dataset show that the proposed LCS-SSM can effectively and reliably differentiate true and false matches compared with state-of-the-art methods, and can be used for robust matching in scenes with fast motion, blurs, and clustered noise.