Image processing apparatus utilizing keypoints in an image analysis and method thereof

#The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus and method thereof. Specifically, the present invention relates to an image processing apparatus and method thereof that determines and utilizes keypoints.

#With the rapid development of technology, various image-processing technologies have been widely used in various fields, e.g., Augmented Reality (AR) and security monitoring. Many applications require the image comparison technology to identify and/or trace a target object in an image, and some applications even calculate other information based on the identified/traced target object. Taking some applications of AR as an example, an image captured by a camera needs to be compared with a reference image of the target object, and then calculates the position and the angle of the camera according to a matched area found in the image by comparison.

#To identify and/or trace a target object, conventional image comparison technologies store one or more reference images of the target object in advance and compare a to-be-analyzed image with the reference image(s) to determine whether the to-be-analyzed image comprises the target object. Many conventional image comparison technologies utilize feature values (e.g., gradients) of each pixels in the to-be-analyzed image to find keypoints for the to-be-analyzed image, and then compare the found keypoints with keypoints in the reference image, thereby determining whether the to-be-analyzed image comprises the target object.

#FIG. 1 depicts a schematic view of an image processing apparatus 1 according to a first embodiment;

#FIG. 2 depicts a schematic view of dividing an image into a plurality of areas;

#FIG. 3 depicts a schematic view of an image processing apparatus 3 according to a second embodiment;

#In the following description, the image processing apparatus and method provided in the present invention will be explained with reference to embodiments thereof. However, these embodiments are not intended to limit the present invention to any environment, applications or implementations described in these embodiments. Therefore, description of these embodiments is only for purpose of illustration rather than to limit the scope of the present invention. It should be appreciated that, in the following embodiments and the attached drawings, elements unrelated to the present invention are omitted from depiction; and dimensions of and dimensional scales among individual elements in the attached drawings are provided only for illustration, but not to limit the scope of the present invention.

#A first embodiment of the present invention is an image processing apparatus 1, and a schematic view thereof is depicted in FIG. 1. The image processing apparatus 1 comprises a transceiving interface 11 and a processor 13, wherein the processor 13 is electrically connected to the transceiving interface 11. The transceiving interface 11 may be one of various wired or wireless interfaces capable of receiving signals and data, and the processor 13 may be any of various processing units, central processing units (CPUs), microprocessors, microcontroller units (MCUs) or other computing apparatuses known to those of ordinary skill in the art. The image processing apparatus 1 may be applied in various fields, e.g., Augmented Reality and safety monitoring, but not limited thereto.

#In this embodiment, the image processing apparatus 1 determines a plurality of representative keypoints of an image by a density restriction based method. A user may determine, in advance or during the operation of the image processing apparatus 1, the number of representative keypoints to be found from an image, and the number is called a representative keypoint number.