Best-Buddies Similarity—Robust Template Matching Using Mutual Nearest Neighbors

We propose a novel method for template matching in unconstrained environments. Its essence is the Best-Buddies Similarity (BBS), a useful, robust, and parameter-free similarity measure between two sets of points. BBS is based on counting the number of Best-Buddies Pairs (BBPs) - pairs of points in s...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Oron, Shaul, Dekel, Tali, Xue, Tianfan, Freeman, William T., Avidan, Shai
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2019
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/121575
Description
Summary:We propose a novel method for template matching in unconstrained environments. Its essence is the Best-Buddies Similarity (BBS), a useful, robust, and parameter-free similarity measure between two sets of points. BBS is based on counting the number of Best-Buddies Pairs (BBPs) - pairs of points in source and target sets that are mutual nearest neighbours, i.e., each point is the nearest neighbour of the other. BBS has several key features that make it robust against complex geometric deformations and high levels of outliers, such as those arising from background clutter and occlusions. We study these properties, provide a statistical analysis that justifies them, and demonstrate the consistent success of BBS on a challenging real-world dataset while using different types of features.