In this paper, we present a novel affine-invariant feature based on SIFT,
leveraging the regular appearance of man-made objects. The feature achieves
full affine invariance without needing to simulate over affine parameter space.
Low-rank SIFT, as we name the feature, is based on our observation that local
tilt, which are caused by changes of camera axis orientation, could be
normalized by converting local patches to standard low-rank forms. Rotation,
translation and scaling invariance could be achieved in ways similar to SIFT.
As an extension of SIFT, our method seeks to add prior to solve the ill-posed
affine parameter estimation problem and normalizes them directly, and is
applicable to objects with regular structures. Furthermore, owing to recent
breakthrough in convex optimization, such parameter could be computed
efficiently. We will demonstrate its effectiveness in place recognition as our
major application. As extra contributions, we also describe our pipeline of
constructing geotagged building database from the ground up, as well as an
efficient scheme for automatic feature selection