applied sciences Article Superpixel-Based Feature Tracking for Structure from Motion Mingwei Cao 1,2 , Wei Jia 1,2, Zhihan Lv 3, Liping Zheng 1,2 and Xiaoping Liu 1,2,* 1 School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China 2 Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Industry Safety and Emergency Technology, Hefei 230009, China 3 School of Data Science and Software Engineering, Qingdao University, Qingdao 266071, China * Correspondence:
[email protected] Received: 4 July 2019; Accepted: 22 July 2019; Published: 24 July 2019 Abstract: Feature tracking in image collections significantly affects the efficiency and accuracy of Structure from Motion (SFM). Insufficient correspondences may result in disconnected structures and incomplete components, while the redundant correspondences containing incorrect ones may yield to folded and superimposed structures. In this paper, we present a Superpixel-based feature tracking method for structure from motion. In the proposed method, we first propose to use a joint approach to detect local keypoints and compute descriptors. Second, the superpixel-based approach is used to generate labels for the input image. Third, we combine the Speed Up Robust Feature and binary test in the generated label regions to produce a set of combined descriptors for the detected keypoints. Fourth, the locality-sensitive hash (LSH)-based k nearest neighboring matching (KNN) is utilized to produce feature correspondences, and then the ratio test approach is used to remove outliers from the previous matching collection. Finally, we conduct comprehensive experiments on several challenging benchmarking datasets including highly ambiguous and duplicated scenes. Experimental results show that the proposed method gets better performances with respect to the state of the art methods.