Image shape matching using diffusion morphology and diffusion correlation

Shape-based matching techniques should provide the matching of scene image fragments registered in various lighting, weather and season conditions or in different spectral bands. The most popular shape-to-shape matching technique is based on a mutual information approach. Another well-known approach is a morphological image-to-shape matching proposed by Pytiev. In this paper we propose a new image-to-shape matching technique based on heat kernels and diffusion maps. The corresponding Diffusion Morphology is proposed as a new generalization of Pytiev morphological scheme. The fast implementation of morphological diffusion filtering is described. An experimental comparison of the newly proposed and aforementioned image-to-shape and shape-to-shape matching techniques as applied to the TV and IR image matching problem is made.