Enhancing the Effectiveness of Local Descriptor Based Image Matching

Image registration has received great attention from researchers over the last few decades. SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform), a local descriptor-based technique is widely used for registering and matching images. To establish correspondences between images, SIFT uses a Euclidean Distance ratio metric. However, this approach leads to a lot of incorrect matches and eliminating these inaccurate matches has been a challenge. Various methods have been proposed attempting to mitigate this problem. In this paper, we propose a scale and orientation harmony-based pruning method that improves image matching process by successfully eliminating incorrect SIFT descriptor matches. Moreover, our technique can predict the image transformation parameters based on a novel adaptive clustering method with much higher matching accuracy. Our experimental results have shown that the proposed method has achieved averages of approximately 16% and 10% higher matching accuracy compared to the traditional SIFT and a contemporary method respectively.