Deformation and Viewpoint Invariant Color Histograms

Color histograms are a very useful and simple descriptor for image regions. However, if the same region is viewed from different positions, different histograms result. Here, we have developed a method to create color histograms that are invariant under any mapping of the surface that is locally affine, and thus a very wide class of viewpoint changes or deformations.

The principle behind this method is that pixels in the two images can be 'weighted' using the gradients in different color channels. So, a deformation of an image region will change both the image and the weights equally.

Two images which illustrate the process of 'weighting':

Publication
J. Domke, Y. Aloimonos, "Deformation and viewpoint invariant color histograms", Proc. BMVC (British Machine Vision Conference), September 2006, Edinburgh, UK. pdf

Download Invariant Color Histogram Matlab Code: invhist.m license
This code takes an image as input, and return a vector with the image's invariant histogram as output.

An example of usage

Visitors since 7 Dec 2005