Comparing Feature Detectors: A bias in the repeatability criteria, and how to correct it

Most computer vision application rely on algorithms finding local correspondences between different images. These algorithms detect and compare stable local invariant descriptors centered at scale-invariant keypoints. Because of the importance of the problem, new keypoint detectors and descriptors are constantly being proposed, each one claiming to perform better (or to be complementary) to the preceding ones. This raises the question of a fair comparison between very diverse methods. This evaluation has been mainly based on a repeatability criterion of the keypoints under a series of image perturbations (blur, illumination, noise, rotations, homotheties, homographies, etc). In this paper, we argue that the classic repeatability criterion is biased towards algorithms producing redundant overlapped detections. To compensate this bias, we propose a variant of the repeatability rate taking into account the descriptors overlap. We apply this variant to revisit the popular benchmark by Mikolajczyk et al., on classic and new feature detectors. Experimental evidence shows that the hierarchy of these feature detectors is severely disrupted by the amended comparator.Comment: Fixed typo in affiliation

Affine Subspace Representation for Feature Description

This paper proposes a novel Affine Subspace Representation (ASR) descriptor to deal with affine distortions induced by viewpoint changes. Unlike the traditional local descriptors such as SIFT, ASR inherently encodes local information of multi-view patches, making it robust to affine distortions while maintaining a high discriminative ability. To this end, PCA is used to represent affine-warped patches as PCA-patch vectors for its compactness and efficiency. Then according to the subspace assumption, which implies that the PCA-patch vectors of various affine-warped patches of the same keypoint can be represented by a low-dimensional linear subspace, the ASR descriptor is obtained by using a simple subspace-to-point mapping. Such a linear subspace representation could accurately capture the underlying information of a keypoint (local structure) under multiple views without sacrificing its distinctiveness. To accelerate the computation of ASR descriptor, a fast approximate algorithm is proposed by moving the most computational part (ie, warp patch under various affine transformations) to an offline training stage. Experimental results show that ASR is not only better than the state-of-the-art descriptors under various image transformations, but also performs well without a dedicated affine invariant detector when dealing with viewpoint changes.Comment: To Appear in the 2014 European Conference on Computer Visio

Scale Invariant Interest Points with Shearlets

Shearlets are a relatively new directional multi-scale framework for signal analysis, which have been shown effective to enhance signal discontinuities such as edges and corners at multiple scales. In this work we address the problem of detecting and describing blob-like features in the shearlets framework. We derive a measure which is very effective for blob detection and closely related to the Laplacian of Gaussian. We demonstrate the measure satisfies the perfect scale invariance property in the continuous case. In the discrete setting, we derive algorithms for blob detection and keypoint description. Finally, we provide qualitative justifications of our findings as well as a quantitative evaluation on benchmark data. We also report an experimental evidence that our method is very suitable to deal with compressed and noisy images, thanks to the sparsity property of shearlets

D2-Net: A Trainable CNN for Joint Detection and Description of Local Features

In this work we address the problem of finding reliable pixel-level correspondences under difficult imaging conditions. We propose an approach where a single convolutional neural network plays a dual role: It is simultaneously a dense feature descriptor and a feature detector. By postponing the detection to a later stage, the obtained keypoints are more stable than their traditional counterparts based on early detection of low-level structures. We show that this model can be trained using pixel correspondences extracted from readily available large-scale SfM reconstructions, without any further annotations. The proposed method obtains state-of-the-art performance on both the difficult Aachen Day-Night localization dataset and the InLoc indoor localization benchmark, as well as competitive performance on other benchmarks for image matching and 3D reconstruction.Comment: Accepted at CVPR 201

Depth-based descriptor for matching keypoints in 3D scenes

Keypoint detection is a basic step in many computer vision algorithms aimed at recognition of objects, automatic navigation and analysis of biomedical images. Successful implementation of higher level image analysis tasks, however, is conditioned by reliable detection of characteristic image local regions termed keypoints. A large number of keypoint detection algorithms has been proposed and verified. In this paper we discuss the most important keypoint detection algorithms. The main part of this work is devoted to description of a keypoint detection algorithm we propose that incorporates depth information computed from stereovision cameras or other depth sensing devices. It is shown that filtering out keypoints that are context dependent, e.g. located at boundaries of objects can improve the matching performance of the keypoints which is the basis for object recognition tasks. This improvement is shown quantitatively by comparing the proposed algorithm to the widely accepted SIFT keypoint detector algorithm. Our study is motivated by a development of a system aimed at aiding the visually impaired in space perception and object identification

RF-Net: An End-to-End Image Matching Network based on Receptive Field

This paper proposes a new end-to-end trainable matching network based on receptive field, RF-Net, to compute sparse correspondence between images. Building end-to-end trainable matching framework is desirable and challenging. The very recent approach, LF-Net, successfully embeds the entire feature extraction pipeline into a jointly trainable pipeline, and produces the state-of-the-art matching results. This paper introduces two modifications to the structure of LF-Net. First, we propose to construct receptive feature maps, which lead to more effective keypoint detection. Second, we introduce a general loss function term, neighbor mask, to facilitate training patch selection. This results in improved stability in descriptor training. We trained RF-Net on the open dataset HPatches, and compared it with other methods on multiple benchmark datasets. Experiments show that RF-Net outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure

Comparison of Feature Extractors for Real-Time Object Detection on Android Smartphone

This paper presents the analysis of real-time object detection method for embedded system particularly the Android smartphone. As we all know, object detection algorithm is a complicated algorithm that consumes high performance hardware to execute the algorithm in real time. However due to the development of embedded hardware and object detection algorithm, current embedded device may be able to execute the object detection algorithm in real-time. In this study, we analyze the best object detection algorithm with respect to efficiency, quality and robustness of the algorithm. Several object detection algorithms have been compared such as Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), Speeded-Up Feature Transform (SuRF), Center Surrounded External (CenSurE), Good Features To Track (GFTT), Maximally-Stable External Region Extractor (MSER), Oriented Binary Robust Independent Elementary Features (ORB), and Features from Accelerated Segment Test (FAST) on the GalaxyS Android smartphone. The results show that FAST algorithm has the best combination of speed and object detection performance

Rotation Invariant on Harris Interest Points for Exposing Image Region Duplication Forgery

Nowadays, image forgery has become common because only an editing package software and a digital camera are required to counterfeit an image. Various fraud detection systems have been developed in accordance with the requirements of numerous applications and to address different types of image forgery. However, image fraud detection is a complicated process given that is necessary to identify the image processing tools used to counterfeit an image. Here, we describe recent developments in image fraud detection. Conventional techniques for detecting duplication forgeries have difficulty in detecting postprocessing falsification, such as grading and joint photographic expert group compression. This study proposes an algorithm that detects image falsification on the basis of Hessian features