Viewpoint invariant texture matching and wide baseline stereo

We describe and demonstrate a texture region descriptor which is invariant to affine geometric and photometric transformations, and insensitive to the shape of the texture region. It is applicable to texture patches which are locally planar and have stationary statistics. The novelty of the descriptor is that it is based on statistics aggregated over the region, resulting in richer and more stable descriptors than those computed at a point. Two texture matching applications of this descriptor are demonstrated: (1) it is used to automatically identify, regions of the same type of texture, but with varying surface pose, within a single image; (2) it is used to support wide baseline stereo, i.e. to enable the automatic computation of the epipolar geometry between two images acquired from quite separated viewpoints. Results are presented on several sets of real images.