Point pattern matching based on kernel partial least squares

Point pattern matching is an essential step in many image processing applications. This letter investigates the spectral approaches of point pattern matching, and presents a spectral feature matching algorithm based on kernel partial least squares (KPLS). Given the feature points of two images, we define position similarity matrices for the reference and sensed images, and extract the pattern vectors from the matrices using KPLS, which indicate the geometric distribution and the inner relationships of the feature points. Feature points matching are done using the bipartite graph matching method. Experiments conducted on both synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the robustness and invariance of the algorithm.