Multiple non-rigid surface detection and registration

Detecting and registering nonrigid surfaces are two important research problems for computer vision. Much work has been done with the assumption that there exists only one instance in the image. In this work, we propose an algorithm that detects and registers multiple nonrigid instances of given objects in a cluttered image. Specifically, after we use low level feature points to obtain the initial matches between templates and the input image, a novel high-order affinity graph is constructed to model the consistency of local topology. A hierarchical clustering approach is then used to locate the nonrigid surfaces. To remove the outliers in the cluster, we propose a deterministic annealing approach based on the Thin Plate Spline (TPS) model. The proposed method achieves high accuracy even when the number of outliers is nineteen times larger than the inliers. As the matches may appear sparsely in each instance, we propose a TPS based match growing approach to propagate the matches. Finally, an approach that fuses feature and appearance information is proposed to register each nonrigid surface. Extensive experiments and evaluations demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves promising results in detecting and registering multiple non-rigid surfaces in a cluttered scene.