Template Matching for Wide-Baseline Panoramic Images from a Vehicle-Borne Multi-Camera Rig

Automatic detection and locating of objects such as poles, traffic signs, and building corners in street scenes captured from a mobile mapping system has many applications. Template matching is a technique that could automatically recognise the counterparts or correspondents of an object from multi-view images. In this study, we aim at finding correspondents of an object from wide baseline panoramic images with large geometric deformations from sphere projection and significant systematic errors from multi-camera rig geometry. Firstly, we deduce the camera model and epipolar model of a multi-camera rig system. Then, epipolar errors are analysed to determine the search area for pixelwise matching. A low-cost laser scanner is optionally used to constrain the depth of an object. Lastly, several classic feature descriptors are introduced to template matching and evaluated on the multi-view panoramic image dataset. We propose a template matching method combining a fast variation of a scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) descriptor. Our method experimentally achieved the best performance in terms of accuracy and efficiency comparing to other feature descriptors and the most recent robust template matching methods.