Rethinking the Fourier-Mellin Transform: Multiple Depths in the Camera’s View

Remote sensing and robotics often rely on visual odometry (VO) for localization. Many standard approaches for VO use feature detection. However, these methods will meet challenges if the environments are feature-deprived or highly repetitive. Fourier-Mellin Transform (FMT) is an alternative VO approach that has been shown to show superior performance in these scenarios and is often used in remote sensing. One limitation of FMT is that it requires an environment that is equidistant to the camera, i.e., single-depth. To extend the applications of FMT to multi-depth environments, this paper presents the extended Fourier-Mellin Transform (eFMT), which maintains the advantages of FMT with respect to feature-deprived scenarios. To show the robustness and accuracy of eFMT, we implement an eFMT-based visual odometry framework and test it in toy examples and a large-scale drone dataset. All these experiments are performed on data collected in challenging scenarios, such as, trees, wooden boards and featureless roofs. The results show that eFMT performs better than FMT in the multi-depth settings. Moreover, eFMT also outperforms state-of-the-art VO algorithms, such as ORB-SLAM3, SVO and DSO, in our experiments.

Semi-Blind Image Resampling Factor Estimation for PRNU Computation

Camera sensor fingerprints for digital camera forensics are formed by Photo-Response Non-Uniformity (PRNU), or more precisely, by estimating PRNU from a set of images taken with a camera. These images must be aligned with each other to establish sensor location pixel-to-pixel correspondence. If some of these images have been resized and cropped, the transformations need to be reversed. In this work we deal with estimation of resizing factor in the presence of one reference image from the same camera. For this problem we coin the term semi-blind estimation of resizing factor. We post two requirements that any solution of this problem should meet. It needs to be reasonably fast and exhibit very low estimation error. Our work shows that this problem can be solved using established image matching in Fourier-Mellin transform applied to vertical and horizontal projections of noise residuals (also called linear patterns).

PRECISE DISPARITY ESTIMATION FOR NARROW BASELINE STEREO BASED ON MULTISCALE SUPERPIXELS AND PHASE CORRELATION

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> With the rapid development of subpixel matching algorithms, the estimation of image shifts with an accuracy of higher than 0.05 pixels is achieved, which makes the narrow baseline stereovision possible. Based on the subpixel matching algorithm using the robust phase correlation (PC), in this work, we present a novel hierarchical and adaptive disparity estimation scheme for narrow baseline stereo, which consists of three main steps: image coregistration, pixel-level disparity estimation, and subpixel refinement. The Fourier-Mellin transform with subpixel PC is used to co-register two input images. Then, the pixel-level disparities are estimated in an iterative manner, which is achieved through multiscale superpixels. The pixel-level PC is performed with the window sizes and locations adaptively determined according to superpixels, with the disparity values calcualted. Fast weighted median filtering based on edge-aware filter is adopted to refine the disparity results. At last, the accurate disparities are calculated via a robust subpixel PC method. The combination of multiscale superpixel hierarchy, adaptive determination of the window size and location of correlation, fast weighted median filtering and subpixel PC make the proposed scheme be able to overcome the issues of either low-texture areas or fattening effect. Experimental results on a pair of UAV images and the comparison with the fixed-window PC methods, the iterative scheme with fixed variation strategy, and a sophisticated implementation using global optimization demonstrate the superiority and reliability of the proposed scheme.</p>