Fast and Interpretable 2D Homography Decomposition: Similarity-Kernel-Similarity and Affine-Core-Affine Transformations

In this article, we present two fast and interpretable decomposition methods for 2D homography, which are named Similarity-Kernel-Similarity (SKS) and Affine-Core-Affine (ACA) transformations respectively. Under the minimal 4-point configuration, two similarity transformations in SKS are computed by two anchor points on source and target planes, respectively. Then, the other two point correspondences can be exploited to compute the middle kernel transformation with only four parameters. Furthermore, ACA uses three anchor points to compute the source and the target affine transformations, followed by computation of the middle core transformation utilizing the other one point correspondence. ACA can compute a homography up to a scale with only 85 floating-point operations (FLOPs), without even any division operations. Therefore, as a plug-in module, ACA facilitates various traditional feature-based Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) pipelines, as well as deep homography pipelines estimating 4-point offsets. In addition to the advantages of geometric parameterization and computational efficiency, SKS and ACA can express each element of homography by a polynomial of input coordinates (7th degree to 9th degree), extend the existing essential Similarity-Affine-Projective (SAP) decomposition and calculate 2D affine transformations in a unified way.