Hopfield neural networks for affine invariant matching

The affine transformation, which consists of rotation, translation, scaling, and shearing transformations, can be considered as an approximation to the perspective transformation. Therefore, it is very important to find an effective means for establishing point correspondences under affine transformation in many applications. In this paper, we consider the point correspondence problem as a subgraph matching problem and develop an energy formulation for affine invariant matching by a Hopfield type neural network. The fourth-order network is investigated first, then order reduction is done by incorporating the neighborhood information in the data. Thus we can use the second-order Hopfield network to perform subgraph isomorphism invariant to affine transformation, which can be applied to an affine invariant shape recognition problem. Experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.