SIFT Flow: Dense Correspondence across Scenes and Its Applications

While image alignment has been studied in different areas of computer vision for decades, aligning images depicting different scenes remains a challenging problem. Analogous to optical flow, where an image is aligned to its temporally adjacent frame, we propose SIFT flow, a method to align an image to its nearest neighbors in a large image corpus containing a variety of scenes. The SIFT flow algorithm consists of matching densely sampled, pixelwise SIFT features between two images while preserving spatial discontinuities. The SIFT features allow robust matching across different scene/object appearances, whereas the discontinuity-preserving spatial model allows matching of objects located at different parts of…

• NS
  National Science Foundation

  Awards: 0747120, 0413232
• ND
  National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate
• MU
  Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative