Multi-Stage Matching Approach for Mobile Platform Visual Imagery

Unpredictable texture structure and motion blur continuously exist in mobile platform visual imagery and seriously reduce the similarity between images. Thus, accurate, stable, and well-distributed matches to follow the accurate pose estimation of the platform are difficult to obtain. To solve such problems, an effective image matching method for mobile platform visual imagery is presented in this study. The proposed method includes three steps, namely, standard initial matching, transformation matrices evaluation and matching propagation. Firstly, an oriented FAST and rotated BRIEF (ORB) method was used to obtain the number of matches and the initial projective transformation relationship between an image pair. Secondly, an evaluation function was set to choose the suitable rotation matrix for the image scene. Finally, geometric correspondence matching was utilized to propagate matches and produce additional reliable matching results. The geometric correspondence matching used the geometric relationship between the image pair and found more suitable matches than the standard ORB matching. Comprehensive experiments on TUM and ICL-NUIM dataset images showed that the proposed algorithm performs better in terms of correct matches, satisfactory matching rate, and higher matching accuracy than the standard ORB and ORB-slam2 initial match methods.