Bayesian formulation of image patch matching using cross-correlation

A classical solution for matching two image patches is to use the cross-correlation coefficient. This works well if there is a lot of structure within the patches, but not so well if the patches are close to uniform. This means that some patches are matched with more confidence than others. By estimating this uncertainty more weight can be put on the confident matches than those that are more uncertain. In this paper we present a system that can learn the distribution of the correlation coefficient from a video sequence of an empty scene. No manual annotation of the video is needed. Two distributions functions are learned for two different cases: i) the correlation between an estimated background image and the current frame showing that background and ii) the correlation between an estimated background image and an unrelated patch.