Learning Cross-Spectral Similarity Measures With Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Cristhian A. Aguilera, Francisco J. Aguilera, Angel D. Sappa, Cristhian Aguilera, Ricardo Toledo; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2016, pp. 1-9

The simultaneous use of images from different spectra can be helpful to improve the performance of many computer vision tasks. The core idea behind the usage of cross-spectral approaches is to take advantage of the strengths of each spectral band providing a richer representation of a scene, which cannot be obtained with just images from one spectral band. In this work we tackle the cross-spectral image similarity problem by using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We explore three different CNN architectures to compare the similarity of cross-spectral image patches. Specifically, we train each network with images from the visible and the near-infrared spectrum, and then test the result with two public cross-spectral datasets. Experimental results show that CNN approaches outperform the current state-of-art on both cross-spectral datasets. Additionally, our experiments show that some CNN architectures are capable of generalizing between different cross-spectral domains.