Feature matching based on unsupervised manifold alignment

Feature-based methods for image registration frequently encounter the correspondence problem. In this paper, we formulate feature-based image registration as a manifold alignment problem, and present a novel matching method for finding the correspondences among different images containing the same object. Different from the semi-supervised manifold alignment, our methods map the data sets to the underlying common manifold without using correspondence information. An iterative multiplicative updating algorithm is proposed to optimize the objective, and its convergence is guaranteed theoretically. The proposed approach has been tested for matching accuracy, and robustness to outliers. Its performance on synthetic and real images is compared with the state-of-the-art reference algorithms.