DAISY: An Efficient Dense Descriptor Applied to Wide-Baseline Stereo

TLDR

DAISY builds on SIFT and GLOH but is much faster and avoids the artifacts that degrade dense matching performance seen with SURF. The paper proposes the DAISY descriptor and an EM-based method for dense depth and occlusion estimation from wide-baseline stereo. The method uses DAISY features and an EM algorithm to jointly estimate dense depth and occlusion maps from wide-baseline image pairs. Experiments demonstrate that the DAISY‑based EM approach outperforms conventional pixel‑ and correlation‑based methods in wide‑baseline stereo, achieving accurate dense depth and occlusion maps and robust performance under varied photometric and geometric conditions.

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a local image descriptor, DAISY, which is very efficient to compute densely. We also present an EM-based algorithm to compute dense depth and occlusion maps from wide-baseline image pairs using this descriptor. This yields much better results in wide-baseline situations than the pixel and correlation-based algorithms that are commonly used in narrow-baseline stereo. Also, using a descriptor makes our algorithm robust against many photometric and geometric transformations. Our descriptor is inspired from earlier ones such as SIFT and GLOH but can be computed much faster for our purposes. Unlike SURF, which can also be computed efficiently at every pixel, it does not introduce artifacts that degrade the matching performance when used densely. It is important to note that our approach is the first algorithm that attempts to estimate dense depth maps from wide-baseline image pairs, and we show that it is a good one at that with many experiments for depth estimation accuracy, occlusion detection, and comparing it against other descriptors on laser-scanned ground truth scenes. We also tested our approach on a variety of indoor and outdoor scenes with different photometric and geometric transformations and our experiments support our claim to being robust against these.