Robust feature correspondence and pattern detection for façade analysis. (Mise en correspondance robuste et détection de modèles visuels appliquées à l'analyse de façades)

For a few years, with the emergence of large image database such as Google Street View, designing efficient, scalable, robust and accurate strategies have now become a critical issue to process very large data, which are also massively contaminated by false positives and massively ambiguous. Indeed, this is of particular interest for property management and diagnosing the health of building façades. Scientifically speaking, this issue puts into question the current state-of-the-art methods in fundamental computer vision problems. More particularly, we address the following problems: (1) robust and scalable feature correspondence and (2) façade image parsing. First, we propose a mathematical formalization of the geometry consistency which plays a key role for a robust feature correspondence. From such a formalization, we derive a novel match propagation method. Our method is experimentally shown to be robust, efficient, scalable and accurate for highly contaminated and massively ambiguous sets of correspondences. Our experiments show that our method performs well in deformable object matching and large-scale and accurate matching problem instances arising in camera calibration. We build a novel repetitive pattern search upon our feature correspondence method. Our pattern search method is shown to be effective for accurate window localization and robust to the potentially great appearance variability of repeated patterns and occlusions. Furthermore, our pattern search method makes very few hallucinations. Finally, we propose methodological contributions that exploit our repeated pattern detection results, which results in a substantially more robust and more accurate façade image parsing.