Now consider the simple case of 5 coplanar points in general position. This example will show that although the theory provides a nice framework, it does not give all the answers.
The isotropy subgroup is the identity: even four of the points are sufficient to define a unique projective basis. There are therefore independent projective invariants. In section 3.1.2, we showed that two suitable invariants can be obtained by taking cross ratios of pencils of lines through any two of the points.
Ideally, we would like to be able to recognise one among a set of such
configurations by computing the two cross ratios from image data and
searching a database for the closest known configuration with those
invariant values. This raises two questions:
1) Which of the 5!=120 possible orderings of the image points was
used for the invariant stored in the database?
2) How should proximity of cross ratios be measured?
The first point is a combinatorial/correspondence problem. One way to
attack this is to create combinations of invariants that are unchanged
under permutations of the points. For example, the 6 possible values of
a cross ratio can be combined into a symmetric, order independent form
such as
Even given this, we still have to choose two of the five points as
base points for the symmetrized cross ratios. Again we can form some
symmetric function of the
possiblities. We could take the
maximum or minimum, or some symmetric polynomial such as:
To compare invariants, something like the traditional Mahalanobis
distance can be used. However, most projective invariants are highly
nonlinear, so the distance has to be evaluated separately at each
configuration: using a single overall distance threshold usually gives very bad results. In fact, close to degenerate
configurations -- here, when three of the points are almost aligned
-- even well-designed Mahalanobis metrics may be insufficient. Such
configurations have to be processed case-by-case (usually, they are
discarded).
Hence, even with careful design, the results of this indexation
approach are not very satisfactory. An exhaustive test on randomly
generated point configurations was performed in [17], with
the conclusion that no usable trade off between false positives and
false negatives existed.
However, the results can be improved by several order of magnitude by the following process:
Ordering the points allows the use of raw (non-symmetrized) cross ratios, which significantly improves the discriminating power. It also makes the invariant computation specific to each class of object considered. With random noise of 1.5 pixel in a image, this process prunes on average about 799 of every 800 configurations. These results have also been validated by independent experiments [14].