A KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEM FOR THE IMAGE CORRESPONDENCE PROBLEM

The image correspondence problem has generally been considered the most difficult step in both stereo and temporal vision. Most existing approaches match area features or linear features extracted from an image pair. The approach described in this paper is novel in that it uses an expert system shell to develop an image correspondence knowledge-based system for the general image correspondence problem. The knowledge it uses consists of both physical properties and spatial relationships of the edges and regions in images for every edge or region matching. A computation network is used to represent this knowledge. It allows the computation of the likelihood of matching two edges or regions with logical and heuristic operators. Heuristics for determining the correspondences between image features and the problem of handling missing information will be discussed. The values of the individual matching results are used to direct the traversal and pruning of the global matching process. The problem of parallelizing the entire process will be discussed. Experimental results on real-world images show that all matching edges and regions have been identified correctly.