A method for the registration of spectral images of paintings and its evaluation

This work concerns the automatic registration of spectral images of paintings upon planar, or approximately planar, surfaces. An approach that capitalizes upon this planarity is proposed, which estimates homography transforms that register the spectral images into an aligned spectral cube. Homography estimation methods are comparatively evaluated for this purpose. A non-linear, robust estimation method that is based on keypoint features is adopted, as the most accurate. A marker-based, quantitative evaluation method is proposed for the measurement of multispectral image registration accuracy and, in turn, utilized for the comparison of the proposed registration method to the state of the art. For the same purpose, characteristic for this application domain, benchmark datasets that are annotated with correctly corresponding points have been compiled and are publicly availed.