Published in Image Processing On Line on 2011–02–24.
Submitted on 2011–00–00, accepted on 2011–00–00.
ISSN 2105–1232
c
2011 IPOL & the authors
CC–BY–NC–SA
This article is available online with supplementary materials,
software, datasets and online demo at
http://dx.doi.org/10.5201/ipol.2011.my-asift
2014/07/01 v0.5 IPOL article class
ASIFT: An Algorithm for Fully Affine Invariant Comparison
Guoshen Yu
1
, Jean-Michel Morel
2
1
CMAP,
´
Ecole Polytechnique, France (yu@cmap.polytechnique.fr)
2
CMLA, ENS Cachan, France (moreljeanmichel@gmail.com)
Abstract
If a physical object has a smoot h or piec ewi s e smooth boundary, its images obtained by cameras
in varying positi ons undergo smoot h apparent deformations. These deformations are locally
well approximated by affine transforms of the image plane. In consequence the solid object
recognition problem has often been led back to the computation of affine invariant image local
features. The simil ar i ty invariance (invariance to translation, rotation, and zoom) is dealt with
rigorously by the SIFT metho d The method illustrated and demonstrated in this work, Affine-
SIFT (ASIFT) , simulates a set of sample views of the initial images, obtainable by varying the
two camera axis orientation parameters, namely the latitude and the longitude angles, which
are not treated by the SIFT method. Then it applies the SIFT method itself to all images thus
generated. Thus, ASIFT covers effectively all six parameters of the affine transform.
Source Code
The source code (ANSI C), its documentation, and the online demo are accessible at the
IPOL
web page of this article
1
.
Keywords: SIFT; affine invariant matching
1 Overview
If a physical object has a smooth or p i e cewi se smooth boundary, its images ob t a i n ed by cameras
in varying positions undergo smooth appar ent deformations. These deformations are locally well
approximated by affine transforms of the im a g e plane.
In consequen ce the solid o bject recogni t ion problem has often been led back to the computation
of affine invariant image local features. Such invariant features could be obtained by normalization
methods, but no fully affine normalization method exists for t h e time being. Yet as shown in [
7]
the similarity invariance (invariance t o translation, rotation, an d zoom) is dea l t with rigorously by
the SIFT m et h od [
1]. By simulating on both images zooms out and by normalizing translation and
rotation, th e SIFT method succeeds in being fully invariant to four out of the six parameters of an
affine tran sf or m .
1
http://dx.doi.org/10.5201/ipol.2011.my-asift
Guoshen Yu, Jean-Michel Morel, ASIFT: An Algorithm for Fully Affine Invariant Comparison, Image Processing On Line, 1 (2011), pp. 11–38.
http://dx.doi.org/10.5201/ipol.2011.my-asift