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# Abstract

The power of modern image matching approaches is still fundamentally limited by the abrupt scale changes in images. In this paper, we propose a scale-invariant image matching approach to tackling the very large scale variation of views. Drawing inspiration from the scale space theory, we start with encoding the image’s scale space into a compact multi-scale representation. Then, rather than trying to find the exact feature matches all in one step, we propose a progressive two-stage approach. First, we determine the related scale levels in scale space, enclosing the inlier feature correspondences, based on an optimal and exhaustive matching in a limited scale space. Second, we produce both the image similarity measurement and feature correspondences simultaneously after restricting matching between the related scale levels in a robust way. The matching performance has been intensively evaluated on vision tasks including image retrieval, feature matching and Structure-from-Motion (SfM). The successful integration of the challenging fusion of high aerial and low ground-level views with significant scale differences manifests the superiority of the proposed approach. (Access the full paper here)

# Datasets

### The Ground-Aerial Dataset

This dataset encompasses a collection of ground and aerial images. It is composed of three individual blocks (see table below) each of which is captured from both aerial views (of resolution $4000\times3000$) and street views (of resolution $4032\times3024$). 3D reconstruction from such image sets is challenging due to the abrupt scale difference, as shown in the figure below. Download link: Block A (8.3G), Block B (13.3G), Block C (19.5G).

Area #Images #Aerial images #Ground images
Block A 2309 822 1487
Block B 3292 1945 1347
Block C 4866 1963 2903

### The Book-Cover Dataset

The Book-Cover dataset is composed of two series of photographs acquired from two viewpoint angles $0$° and $30$° with increasing zoom. The $28$ images have the same size of $3024\times4032$ pixels. The closet-captured photograph of a book cover is used as reference image and is matched against other $27$ ones with image scale ratio ranging from $2$ to $64$ times. See sample matching results in the figure below. Download link: The Book-Cover Dataset (87.7M).

### Terms of Use

The datasets above are provided for research purposes only and without any warranty. Any commercial use is prohibited.

# Reference

Here is the Bibtex snippet for citing the Dataset in your work.

@InProceedings{Zhou_2017_ICCV,
author = {Zhou, Lei and Zhu, Siyu and Shen, Tianwei and Wang, Jinglu and Fang, Tian and Quan, Long},
title = {Progressive Large Scale-Invariant Image Matching in Scale Space},
booktitle = {ICCV},
year = {2017}
}