Efficient image matching: a hierarchical chamfer matching scheme via distributed system

Image matching has played a key role in object recognition and localization. One central problem is to find an efficient and effective approach to search for the best matching between two image sets. In contrast to the conventional matching techniques, the innovation of our method detailed in this paper is to propose a hierarchical Chamfer matching scheme based on the dynamic detection of interesting points. The algorithm extends the traditional methods by introducing interesting points to replace edge points in distance transform for the matching measurement. The search for the best matching is guided by minimizing a given matching criterion in an interesting points pyramid from coarse level to fine level. The pyramid is created through a dynamic thresholding scheme and such a hierarchical structure aims to reduce the computation load. The processing speed is further improved by parallel implementation on a low cost heterogeneous PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) network without specific software and hardware requirements. The experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm is simple to implement and quite insensitive to noise and other disturbances with reliability and efficiency.