Image matching with scale adjustment

In this paper we address the problem ofmatching two images with two different resolutions: a high-resolution image and a low-resolution one. The difference in resolution between the two images is not known and without loss of generality one of the images is assumed to be the high-resolution one. On the premise that changes in resolution act as a smoothing equivalent to changes in scale, a scale-space representation of the high-resolution image is produced.Hence the one-toone classical image matching paradigm becomes one-to-many because the low-resolution image is comparedwith all the scale-space representations of the high-resolution one.Key to the success of such a process is the proper representation of the features to be matched in scale-space. We show how to represent and extract interest points at variable scales and we devise a method allowing the comparison of two images at two different resolutions. The method comprises the use of photometricand rotation-invariant descriptors, a geometricmodelmapping the high-resolution imageonto a low-resolution image region, andan imagematching strategy basedon local constraints and on the robust estimation of this geometric model. Extensive experiments show that our matching method can be used for scale changes up to a factor of 6. 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.