Joint point and line segment matching on wide-baseline stereo images

This paper presents an method that matches points and line segments jointly on wide-baseline stereo images. In both two images to be matched, line segments are extracted and those spatially adjacent ones are intersected to generate V-junctions. To match V-junctions from the two images, we extract for each of them an affine and scale invariant local region and describe it with SIFT. The putative V-junction matches obtained from evaluating their description vectors are refined subsequently by the epipolar line constraint and topological distribution constraint among neighbor V-junctions. Since once a pair of V-junctions are matched, the two pairs of line segments forming them are matched accordingly. A part of line segments from the two images are therefore matched along with V-junction matches. To get more line segment matches, we further match those left unmatched line segments by the local homographies estimated from their adjacent V-junction matches. Experiments verify the robustness of the proposed method and its superiority to both some famous point and line segment matching methods on wide-baseline stereo images. In addition, we also show the proposed method can make it easier for 3D line segment reconstruction.