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Object matching algorithms using robust

Hausdorff distance measures
Article in IEEE Transactions on Image Processing March 1999
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425

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on the type of the features used, matching measure criterion, and so

on. Low-level matching algorithms, i.e., algorithms using a distance
transform (DT) [4][6] and a Hausdorff distance (HD) [7][9] have
been investigated because they are simple and insensitive to changes
of image characteristics.
In this paper, we apply the robust statistics of regression analysis
[10], [11] to the computation of the HD measures for object matching,
resulting in two robust HD measures: M-HD based on M-estimation
and least trimmed square-HD (LTS-HD) based on LTS. The two
proposed robust approaches yield the correct results, even though
the input data are severely corrupted.
The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section II reviews the conventional HD measures and related robust statistics. In
Section III, two proposed robust object matching algorithms based
on HD measures are presented [12][14]. Experimental results for
images with occlusions and noisy images are shown in Section IV,
and conclusions are given in Section V.
II. OBJECT MATCHING ALGORITHMS USING
THE CONVENTIONAL HD MEASURES
The HD measure computes a distance value between two sets
of edge points extracted from the object model and a test image. The classical HD measure [7] between two point sets A =
fa1 ; 1 1 1 ; aN g and B = fb1 ; 1 1 1 ; bN g of sizes NA and NB ,
respectively, is defined as
H (A; B )

Object Matching Algorithms Using

Robust Hausdorff Distance Measures
Dong-Gyu Sim, Oh-Kyu Kwon, and Rae-Hong Park

= max(h(A;

Index TermsHausdorff distance, least trimmed square, M-estimation,

object matching.

Object matching in two-dimensional (2-D) images has been an

important topic in computer vision, object recognition, and image
analysis [1][3]. The performance of the matching method depends
Manuscript received June 26, 1997; revised May 27, 1998. This paper was
presented in part at the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing,
Lausanne, Switzerland, September 1996. The associate editor coordinating the
review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Prof. Dmitry
B. Goldgof.
D.-G. Sim and R.-H. Park are with the Department of Electronic
Engineering, Sogang University, Seoul 100-611, Korea (e-mail: rhpark@ccs.sogang.ac.kr).
O.-K. Kwon was with the Department of Electronic Engineering, Sogang
University, Seoul 100-611, Korea. He is now with MJL Korea, Ltd., Seoul
150010, Korea.
Publisher Item Identifier S 1057-7149(99)10560-8.

th

Ka

2A dB (a)

(2)

where dB (a) represents the minimum distance value at point a to the

point set B , and Kath2A denotes the K th ranked value of dB (a). This
HD measure needs one parameter, f = K=NA , whose range is from
0.0 to 1.0. Depending on the fractional value of f , its performance
widely varies. Experimentally, when f is about 0.6, good matching
results are obtained.
By modifying the HD based on the ranked order statistics, Azencott
et al. proposed the CHD measure in comparing binary images [8].
The directed distance of the CHD is defined as
hK; L (A; B )

I. INTRODUCTION

(1)

where h(A; B ) and h(B; A) represent the directed distances between two sets A and B .
Huttenlocher et al. proposed the partial HD measure in comparing
partial portions of images containing severe occlusions or degradation
[7]. The directed distance of the partial HD is defined as
hK (A; B )

AbstractA Hausdorff distance (HD) is one of commonly used measures for object matching. This work analyzes the conventional HD
measures and proposes two robust HD measures based on M-estimation
and least trimmed square (LTS) which are more efficient than the
conventional HD measures. By computer simulation, the matching performance of the conventional and proposed HD measures is compared
with synthetic and real images.

B ); h(B; A))

th

th

jj 0 jj

(3)

dB (a):

(4)

Pa A Qb B

th ranked value of Qbth2B jja 0 bjj, with

2 representing the Qth ranked value of the Euclidean distance
set. The CHD measure requires two parameters: p = P =NA and
q = Q=NE , where NE denotes the size of the Euclidean distance
set. The range of both parameters is from 0.0 to 1.0. Experimentally,
when p is from 0.8 to 0.9 and q is from 0.01 to 0.05, good matching
results are obtained.
Dubuisson and Jain proposed the MHD based on the average
distance value in comparing the synthetic images contaminated by
four types of noise [9]. The directed distance of the MHD is defined
as
where

th
Qb B

th

2 denotes the

Pa A

10577149/99$10.00 1999 IEEE

hMHD (A; B )

1
NA

2A

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In the proposed LTS-HD based on the LTS scheme [11], [12], the
directed distance hLTS (A; B ) is defined by a linear combination of
order statistics

hLTS (A; B ) =

(a)

(b)

(c)

Fig. 1. Matching result of a synthetic test image. (a) Object model (72
72). (b) Test image (256
256). (c) Matching result of (a) and (b) by the
proposed LTS-HD (h = 0:6).

The MHD measure does not require a parameter, however its matching performance is not good, compared with that of the partial HD
and the CHD, because it employs the summation operator over all
distances some of which might be computed from outliers.
III. PROPOSED OBJECT MATCHING
ALGORITHMS USING ROBUST HD MEASURES
This work proposes two robust HD measures based on the robust
statistics such as M-estimation and LTS.
The directed distance hM (A; B ) of the proposed M-HD based on
M-estimation is realized by replacing the Euclidean distance by the
cost function that can eliminate outliers [11], [14], [15]. M-estimation
minimizes the summation of a cost function . The directed distance
hM (A; B ) is defined as

hM (A; B ) =

NA a2A

(dB (a))

where the cost function  is convex and symmetric and has a unique
minimum value at zero. In our experiments, we use the cost function
 defined by

(x) =

jxj;
;

xj  
xj > 

H i=1

dB (a)(i)

where H denotes h 2 NA , as in the partial HD case, and dB (x)(i)

represents the ith distance value in the sorted sequence (dB (x)(1)
 dB (x)(2)  1 1 1  dB (x)(N ) ). The measure hLTS (A; B ) is
minimized by remaining distance values after large distance values
are eliminated. So, even if the object is occluded or degraded by
noise, this matching scheme yields good results. An optimal fraction
h, whose range is from zero to one, depends on the amount of
occlusion. If h is equal to one, this HD measure corresponds to
the conventional MHD. In the proposed algorithms, a full search is
adopted for finding the optimal matching location, that is, the point
that yields a minimum distance is selected because the proposed
algorithm are based on a distance measure. The computation time
can be reduced by introducing efficient search algorithms such as
hierarchical or pyramid schemes.
The object matching algorithms based on two robust HD measures
are insensitive to outliers and occlusions, because of employment
of the robust estimation in computing the HD measures. Also they
yield an efficiency larger than that of the conventional ones, because
of the average operation embedded into them, resulting in algorithms
relatively insensitive to the change of parameters, e.g.,  of the M-HD
and h of the LTS-HD.
The M-HD measure requires comparison and summation operations, whereas the LTS-HD measure requires sorting and summation
operations. The partial HD requires a sorting operation as in LTSHD measure computation, where sorting operations can be computed
with linear time and real-time algorithms [16], [17]. As a result,
the computational complexity of the two proposed HD measures
is almost the same as that of the conventional HD measures such
as the partial HD and the MHD. Note that the DT map can be
used for fast computation of various HD measures and that the
computational complexity of the CHD is much higher than that of
other HD measures.
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

AND

DISCUSSIONS

To show the matching performance of the proposed HD measures,

we compare the performance of the conventional and proposed HD
measures, in terms of the matching position, for synthetic and several
real images with various levels of noise, distortion, and occlusions.
The matching position is defined by the position, detected by each
HD measure, of the object model with respect to the test image.
Because the object matching by the CHD is not attractive in terms of
the computational load and its matching performance greatly depends
on two parameters p and q , we just select the partial HD and MHD
as the conventional HD measures in performance comparison. They
have almost the same computational complexity and the same number
of parameters as those of the proposed HD measures.

j
j

where  is a threshold to eliminate outliers, so the outliers yielding

large errors are discarded. In M-HD, because the matching performance depends on the parameter  , it is important to determine 
appropriately. If  is set to infinity, this HD measure is equivalent
to the conventional MHD. Because the cost function  is associated
with the distance value dB (a), the threshold value  between three
and five is selected experimentally.

A. Performance Comparison of HD Measures for

Matching of Occluded and Degraded Objects
Fig. 1 shows the matching result of a synthetic test image containing occlusion. The 72 2 72 object model, a square, is shown in
Fig. 1(a), and a 256 2 256 test image composed of two quadrangles,
a circle, and a triangle is shown in Fig. 1(b). Also the matching result
of the proposed LTS-HD, with h = 0:6, is shown in Fig. 1(c), where
the object model is superimposed on the test image. Note that the

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 8, NO. 3, MARCH 1999

MATCHING POSITION RESULTS

(a)

BY

TABLE I
CONVENTIONAL

(b)

Fig. 2. Matching result of a real test image. (a) Object model (72
by the two proposed HD measures.

427

AND

PROPOSED HD MEASURES

(c)

2 72). (b) Test image (256 2 256). (c) Identical matching result of (a) and (b)

proposed HD yields the correct position, even if the object model is

partially occluded.
Table I shows the comparison of the matching performance in
terms of the matching position detected by the conventional and
proposed HD measures, for the synthetic image shown in Fig. 1(b),
where the correct position is (74, 62). The proposed HD measures yield the position error smaller than the partial HD and
MHD. In experiments with the synthetic image, the proposed HD
measures give more accurate position than the partial HD, because of the average operation embedded in the proposed HD
measures. Also, the proposed robust HD measures produce better
results than the MHD by effectively removing outliers caused by
occlusions.

As a real test image, we use the 256 2 256 road image

contaminated by Gaussian noise (standard deviation  = 30) [8].
Also about 35% pixels of the target portion of an input image is
deleted. The 72 2 72 object model and the test image are shown in
Fig. 2(a) and (b), respectively. The matching result obtained by the
two proposed HD measures is shown in Fig. 2(c), where the object
model is superimposed on the test image.
Table I shows that the proposed HD measures yield better results
than the conventional ones for the real image. The matching position estimated by the two proposed HD measures (M-HD with
 = 3; 4; 5 and LTS-HD with h = 0:60; 0:70; 0:80), is correct,
thus the superimposed matching results are identical, as shown in
Fig. 2(c). On the other hand, the matching position detected by

428

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 8, NO. 3, MARCH 1999

(a)

(b)

(c)
Fig. 3. Matching results by the conventional and proposed HD measures with the various amount of uniform noise (U ) and fixed line noise (V = 10):
(a) partial HD; (b) M-HD; (c) LTS-HD.

two conventional HD matching (with f = 0:6 for the partial HD,

matching results are almost correct) is not correct. According to
Table I, a false alarm (123, 158) is detected. This point yields a
small distance with a large similarity, whenever the correct matching
point is detected.

B. Performance Comparison of HD Measures

for Noisy Binary Images
Fig. 3 shows the RMS matching position error for the noisy road
image by the conventional and proposed HD measures, as a function
of the corresponding parameter of each measure, with the amount of
uniform noise level U and fixed line noise (V = 10) varying. As the
uniform noise U increases, the RMS position error increases.
Fig. 3(a) shows the RMS matching position error by the conventional partial HD, when the partial fraction f is from 0.5 to
1.0. Because the outliers are not effectively removed with respect
to ranked order statistics, when f is larger than 0.6, the matching
performance is not good. In Fig. 3(b), because there is no data which
can measure the similarity between objects, when  is equal to 0.0, the
matching result is not good. Also for large  , because the outliers are
not effectively removed by the cost function , the RMS position error
is large. Fig. 3(c) shows that if the parameter h of the LTS-HD is from
0.50 to 0.90, the RMS position error is 0, i.e., the matching results are
perfect. If h is larger than 0.90, the LTS-HD yields incorrect results,
because the outliers are not effectively removed.
The parameters of the proposed M-HD and LTS-HD can not be
accurately determined. Though the parameters of the proposed robust
HD measures depend on the amount of noise and various kinds of
objects/noise, appropriate  and h of M-HD and LTS-HD are about
5 and 0.7, respectively, which are selected experimentally.

V. CONCLUSIONS
This correspondence proposes two efficient HD measures that are
robust to outliers and occlusions. They are realized by applying the
robust estimators such as M-estimation and LTS methods to the
conventional HD algorithm. The effectiveness of the proposed HD
measures are tested with various images and noise environments.
Further research will focus on the application of the hierarchical
structure to two proposed HD measures to reduce the computation
time. Also application of other robust estimators to computation of
the HD measures is to be investigated.
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Hybrid Estimation of Navigation

Parameters from Aerial Image Sequence
Dong-Gyu Sim, Sang-Yong Jeong, Doh-Hyeong Lee,
Rae-Hong Park, Rin-Chul Kim, Sang Uk Lee, and In Chul Kim
Fig. 1.

Proposed integrated position estimation system.

Abstract This work presents a hybrid method for navigation parameter estimation using sequential aerial images, where navigation
parameters represent the position and velocity information of an aircraft
for autonomous navigation. The proposed hybrid system is composed
of two parts: relative position estimation and absolute position estimation. Computer simulation with two different sets of real aerial image
sequences shows the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid parameter
estimation algorithm.
Index TermsAerial image, digital elevation model, image matching,
navigation, recovered elevation model.

I. INTRODUCTION
Estimation of navigation parameters is important for autonomous
navigation and many approaches have been presented [1][5]. This
paper investigates the estimation of navigation parameters for an
Manuscript received August 13, 1997; revised April 27, 1998. This work
was supported in part by the Agency for Defense Development and by
ACRC (Automatic Control Research Center), Seoul National University.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the IEEE International
Conference on Image Processing, Lausanne, Switzerland, September 1996.
The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving
it for publication was Prof. Dmitry B. Goldgof.
D.-G. Sim and R.-H. Park are with the Department of Electronic Engineering, Sogang University, Seoul 100-611, Korea.
S.-Y. Jeong was with the Department of Electronic Engineering, Sogang
University, Seoul 100-611, Korea. He is now with the Kia Motors Corporation,
Kwangmyung City, 423050 Korea.
D.-H. Lee was with the Department of Electronic Engineering, Sogang
University, Seoul 100-611, Korea. He is now with Samsung Electronics
Company, Ltd., Suwon City, 442742, Korea.
R.-C. Kim is with the School of Information and Computer Engineering,
Hansung University, Seoul 136-792, Korea.
S. U. Lee is with the School of Electrical Engineering, Seoul National
University, Seoul 151-742, Korea.
I. C. Kim is with the Agency for Defense Development, Daejon 305-600,
Korea.
Publisher Item Identifier S 1057-7149(99)01557-2.

Fig. 2. Relative position estimation.

aircraft using sequential aerial images. Because only the aerial image
sequence is used as an input in our navigation system, the navigation
system has advantages in that it is not detected by enemies nor guided
by external signals, compared with other active approaches. Also,
it can be attached to an aircraft without any special apparatus for
compensation of an attitude change. Two test aerial sequences used
in this work were acquired from a camera fixed on a light airplane and
a helicopter, in which the optical axis of the camera varies according
to the aircraft attitude.
This work presents an integrated system for navigation parameter
estimation using aerial sequence images. The main objective of the
paper is to develop an effective algorithm for real-time implementation. The proposed system is composed of two parts: relative position
estimation and absolute position estimation. The former is based on
stereo modeling of two successive image frames, whereas the latter is
accomplished by image matching with reference images or by using
digital elevation model (DEM) information.

10577149/99$10.00 1999 IEEE