GENERATION OF A BENCHMARK DATASET USING HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS FOR AN AUTOMATED EVALUATION OF DIFFERENT FEATURE MATCHING METHODS

Abstract. This contribution shows the generation of a benchmark dataset using historical images. The difficulties when working with historical images are pointed out and structured in three categories. Especially large viewpoint differences, image artifacts and radiometric differences lead to weak matching results with classical feature matching approaches. The necessity of publishing an own benchmark dataset is emphasized when comparing to existing datasets which are partly using synthetic data, well-known orientation or strictly categorized image differences. The presented image dataset consists at the moment of 24 images which are oriented in image triples using the properties of the Trifocal Tensor as a more stable image geometry. In the following, three different feature detectors and descriptors that have already been proven well on historical images (MSER, ORB, RIFT) are evaluated using the new benchmark dataset. Then, several outlier removal methods were applied on the detected features. The tests show that for the entirety of image pairs RIFT performs slightly better than the other two methods. Nonetheless, for some image pairs MSER significantly improves the matching score but even so, historical image pairs are difficult to be matched with the presented methods due to challenging outlier removal. Still, the estimated projective relative orientation could be used in an autocalibration approach to place the images in a metric scene.