Robust Least-Squares Image Matching in the Presence of Outliers.

Although interfering (outlying) details complicate image re- cognition and retrieval, ‘soft masking' of outliers shows considerable promise for robust pixel-by-pixel image matching or reconstruction from principal components (PC). Modeling the differences between two images or between an image and its PC estimate (obtained as a projection onto a subspace of PCs) with a mixed distribution of random noise and outliers, the masks are produced by a simple iterative Expectation-Maximisation based procedure. Experiments with facial images (extracted from the MIT face database) demonstrate the efficiency of this approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]