Bayesian Formulation of Image Patch Matching Using Cross-correlation

A classical solution for matching two image patches is to use the cross-correlation coefficient. This works well if there is a lot of structure within the patches, but not so well if the patches are close to uniform. This means that some patches are matched with more confidence than others. By estimating this uncertainty, more weight can be put on the confident matches than those that are more uncertain. To enable this two distribution functions for two different cases are used: (i) the correlation between two patches showing the same object but with different lighting conditions and different noise realisations and (ii) the correlation between two unrelated patches.