Robust Affine-Invariant Line Matching for High Resolution Remote Sensing Images

Point-based matching methods usually hold limitation in dealing with low texture scenes. In this paper, a robust affine-invariant lines matching method is proposed. The method commences with line segments extraction. All the extracted line segments are grouped into salient lines and general lines. Accordingly, the matching procedure includes salient lines matching and general lines matching. In salient lines matching, affine invariants are calculated and the matched salient line correspondences are the basis of the general lines matching. Each general line is clustered into a matched salient line according to a certain rule. Taking each salient line as the root, together with all the general lines clustered to it, a control network is constructed. Finally, the general lines matching procedure is performed between the two subnetworks whose roots are correspondences. Experimental results show that our proposed method can successfully process local distortion and improve the matching performance in low texture areas.