Image Matching Using High Dynamic Range Images and Radial Feature Descriptors

Obtaining a top match for a given query image from a set of images forms an important part of the scene identification process. The query image typically is not identical to the images in the data set, with possible variations of changes in scale, viewing angle and lighting conditions. Therefore, features which are used to describe each image should be invariant to these changes. Standard image capturing devices lose much of the color and lighting information due to encoding during image capture. This paper uses high dynamic range images to utilize all the details obtained at the time of capture for image matching. Once the high dynamic range images are obtained through the fusion of low dynamic range images, feature detection is performed on the query images as well as on the images in the database. A junction detector algorithm is used for detecting the features in the image. The features are described using the wedge descriptor which is modified to adapt to high dynamic range images. Once the features are described, a voting algorithm is used to identify a set of top matches for the query image.