For a client’s project recently I needed to be able to correlate the positions of a number of points in 2D space from one image to another. These aren’t ‘features’ as usually handled by routines such as SIFT/SURF/ORB, etc, but just 2D points with no other attributes at all. Most of the points in image A will be present in image B, but some may be missing, there may be extras, and image B may be rotated, scaled, and translated in x,y, by any amount.
It turns out to be quite an interesting problem. Luckily the number of points in the images were fairly small (<50), so a brute force approach works – and it does work well. As long as the most of the points in image A are present in image B, in something close to the same positions relative to each other, then they are found correctly in image B – and importantly the algorithm knows which points correlates with which, so the position of each point can be ‘followed’ into the new image. Finally, it returns the amount of rotation, scaling and translation applied.
If there were a large number of points, the efficiency of the algorithm would be a problem, and a different approach would be needed, but for this application it has worked very well.