29/4/24, 23:04 Introduction To Feature Detection And Matching | by Deepanshu Tyagi | Medium

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Introduction To Feature Detection And

Matching
Deepanshu Tyagi · Follow
5 min read · Jan 3, 2019

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F eature detection and matching is an important task in many computer vision

applications, such as structure-from-motion, image retrieval, object
detection, and more. In this series, we will be talking about local feature detection
and matching.

This is part of a 7-series Feature Detection and Matching. Other articles included

Introduction to Harris Corner Detector

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Introduction to SIFT (Scale-Invariant Feature Transform)

Introduction to SURF (Speeded-Up Robust Features)

Introduction to FAST (Features from Accelerated Segment Test)

Introduction to BRIEF (Binary Robust Independent Elementary Features)

Introduction to ORB (Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF)

Application Of Feature Detection And Matching

Automate object tracking

Point matching for computing disparity

Stereo calibration(Estimation of the fundamental matrix)

Motion-based segmentation

Recognition

3D object reconstruction

Robot navigation

Image retrieval and indexing

Feature
A feature is a piece of information which is relevant for solving the computational
task related to a certain application. Features may be specific structures in the
image such as points, edges or objects. Features may also be the result of a general
neighborhood operation or feature detection applied to the image. The features can
be classified into two main categories:

The features that are in specific locations of the images, such as mountain
peaks, building corners, doorways, or interestingly shaped patches of snow.
These kinds of localized features are often called keypoint features (or even
corners) and are often described by the appearance of patches of pixels
surrounding the point location.

The features that can be matched based on their orientation and local
appearance (edge profiles) are called edges and they can also be good indicators
of object boundaries and occlusion events in the image sequence.
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Main Component Of Feature Detection And Matching

Detection: Identify the Interest Point

Description: The local appearance around each feature point is described in

some way that is (ideally) invariant under changes in illumination, translation,
scale, and in-plane rotation. We typically end up with a descriptor vector for
each feature point.

Matching: Descriptors are compared across the images, to identify similar

features. For two images we may get a set of pairs (Xi, Yi) ↔ (Xi`, Yi`), where (Xi,
Yi) is a feature in one image and (Xi`, Yi`) its matching feature in the other
image.

Interest Point
Interest point or Feature Point is the point which is expressive in texture. Interest
point is the point at which the direction of the boundary of the object changes
abruptly or intersection point between two or more edge segments.

Open in app

Search

Properties Of Interest Point

It has a well-defined position in image space or well localized.

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It is stable under local and global perturbations in the image domain as

illumination/brightness variations, such that the interest points can be reliably
computed with a high degree of repeatability.

Should provide efficient detection.

Possible Approaches
Based on the brightness of an image(Usually by image derivative).

Based on Boundary extraction(Usually by Edge detection and Curvature

analysis).

Algorithms for Identification

Harris Corner

SIFT(Scale Invariant Feature Transform)

SURF(Speeded Up Robust Feature)

FAST(Features from Accelerated Segment Test)

ORB(Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF)

Feature Descriptor
A feature descriptor is an algorithm which takes an image and outputs feature
descriptors/feature vectors. Feature descriptors encode interesting information into
a series of numbers and act as a sort of numerical “fingerprint” that can be used to
differentiate one feature from another.

Ideally, this information would be invariant under image transformation, so we can

find the feature again even if the image is transformed in some way. After detecting

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interest point we go on to compute a descriptor for every one of them. Descriptors

can be categorized into two classes:

Local Descriptor: It is a compact representation of a point’s local neighborhood.

Local descriptors try to resemble shape and appearance only in a local
neighborhood around a point and thus are very suitable for representing it in
terms of matching.

Global Descriptor: A global descriptor describes the whole image. They are
generally not very robust as a change in part of the image may cause it to fail as
it will affect the resulting descriptor.

Algorithms
SIFT(Scale Invariant Feature Transform)

SURF(Speeded Up Robust Feature)

BRISK (Binary Robust Invariant Scalable Keypoints)

BRIEF (Binary Robust Independent Elementary Features)

ORB(Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF)

Features Matching
Features matching or generally image matching, a part of many computer vision
applications such as image registration, camera calibration and object recognition,
is the task of establishing correspondences between two images of the same
scene/object. A common approach to image matching consists of detecting a set of
interest points each associated with image descriptors from image data. Once the
features and their descriptors have been extracted from two or more images, the
next step is to establish some preliminary feature matches between these images.

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Generally, the performance of matching methods based on interest points depends

on both the properties of the underlying interest points and the choice of associated
image descriptors. Thus, detectors and descriptors appropriate for images contents
shall be used in applications. For instance, if an image contains bacteria cells, the
blob detector should be used rather than the corner detector. But, if the image is an
aerial view of a city, the corner detector is suitable to find man-made structures.
Furthermore, selecting a detector and a descriptor that addresses the image
degradation is very important.

Algorithms
Brute-Force Matcher

FLANN(Fast Library for Approximate Nearest Neighbors) Matcher

Algorithm For Feature Detection And Matching

Find a set of distinctive keypoints

Define a region around each keypoint

Extract and normalize the region content

Compute a local descriptor from the normalized region

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Match local descriptors

References
Bradski and Kaehler. Learning OpenCV: Computer Vision with the OpenCV
Library. O’Reilly, 2008.

M. Brown, R. Szeliski, and S. Winder. Multi-image matching using multi-scale

oriented patches. In Proc. CVPR pages 510–517, 2005.

H. Bay, T. Tuytelaars, and L. Van Gool. SURF: Speeded up robust features. In

Proc. ECCV, pages 404–417, 2006.

C. Harris and M. J. Stephens. A combined corner and edge detector. In Alvey

Vision Conference, pages 147–152, 1988.

Y. Ke and R. Sukthankar. PCA-SIFT: a more distinctive representation for local

image descriptors. In Proc. CVPR, pages 506–513, 2004.

Edward Rosten and Tom Drummond, “Machine learning for high speed corner
detection” in 9th European Conference on Computer Vision, vol. 1, 2006, pp.
430–443.

Edward Rosten, Reid Porter, and Tom Drummond, “Faster and better: a machine
learning approach to corner detection” in IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and
Machine Intelligence, 2010, vol 32, pp. 105–119.

R. Szeliski. Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications. Springer, 2010.

https://docs.opencv.org/3.0-
beta/doc/py_tutorials/py_feature2d/py_table_of_contents_feature2d/py_table_of_
contents_feature2d.html

https://udacity.com/course/computer-vision-nanodegree--nd891

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