The extraction and matching of interest points is a prerequisite for many geometric computer vision problems. Traditionally, matching has been achieved by assigning descriptors to interest points and matching points that have similar descriptors. In this paper, we propose a method by which interest points are instead already implicitly matched at detection time. With this, descriptors do not need to be calculated, stored, communicated, or matched any more. This is achieved by a convolutional neural network with multiple output channels and can be thought of as a collection of a variety of detectors, each specialized to specific visual features. This paper describes how to design and train such a network in a way that results in successful relative pose estimation performance despite the limitation on interest point count. While the overall matching score is slightly lower than with traditional methods, the approach is descriptor free and thus enables localization systems with a significantly smaller memory footprint and multi-agent localization systems with lower bandwidth requirements. The network also outputs the confidence for a specific interest point resulting in a valid match. We evaluate performance relative to state-of-the-art alternatives.
Once a set of interest points has been extracted in the images, they need to be matched between each other to establish one-to-one correspondences. The simplest approach would be to match points whose surrounding image patches are most similar to each other, but this approach is very fragile to slight changes in illumination and viewpoint. To provide remedy to this variance, descriptors have been introduced. Descriptors are functions of patches, whose output is typically lower-dimensional, but invariant to slight illumination and viewpoint changes, yet still distinctive enough to differ between the different points extracted in one image. A popular class of traditional descriptors is histograms of gradients (HoG) @cite_50 . Another example are binary descriptors, which are particularly efficient to calculate @cite_31 @cite_45 .
@cite_31 @cite_45 @cite_50
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In this paper we propose a new approach for learning local descriptors for matching image patches. It has recently been demonstrated that descriptors based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) can significantly improve the matching performance. Unfortunately their computational complexity is prohibitive for any practical application. We address this problem and propose a CNN based descriptor with improved matching performance, significantly reduced training and execution time, as well as low dimensionality. We propose to train the network with triplets of patches that include a positive and negative pairs. To that end we introduce a new loss function that exploits the relations within the triplets. We compare our approach to recently introduced MatchNet and DeepCompare and demonstrate the advantages of our descriptor in terms of performance, memory footprint and speed i.e. when run in GPU, the extraction time of our 128 dimensional feature is comparable to the fastest available binary descriptors such as BRIEF and ORB. The design of low-level image features is critical for computer vision algorithms. Orientation histograms, such as those in SIFT [16] and HOG [3], are the most successful and popular features for visual object and scene recognition. We highlight the kernel view of orientation histograms, and show that they are equivalent to a certain type of match kernels over image patches. This novel view allows us to design a family of kernel descriptors which provide a unified and principled framework to turn pixel attributes (gradient, color, local binary pattern, etc.) into compact patch-level features. In particular, we introduce three types of match kernels to measure similarities between image patches, and construct compact low-dimensional kernel descriptors from these match kernels using kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) [23]. Kernel descriptors are easy to design and can turn any type of pixel attribute into patch-level features. They outperform carefully tuned and sophisticated features including SIFT and deep belief networks. We report superior performance on standard image classification benchmarks: Scene-15, Caltech-101, CIFAR10 and CIFAR10-ImageNet. The extraction and matching of interest points is a prerequisite for many geometric computer vision problems. Traditionally, matching has been achieved by assigning descriptors to interest points and matching points that have similar descriptors. In this paper, we propose a method by which interest points are instead already implicitly matched at detection time. With this, descriptors do not need to be calculated, stored, communicated, or matched any more. This is achieved by a convolutional neural network with multiple output channels and can be thought of as a collection of a variety of detectors, each specialized to specific visual features. This paper describes how to design and train such a network in a way that results in successful relative pose estimation performance despite the limitation on interest point count. While the overall matching score is slightly lower than with traditional methods, the approach is descriptor free and thus enables localization systems with a significantly smaller memory footprint and multi-agent localization systems with lower bandwidth requirements. The network also outputs the confidence for a specific interest point resulting in a valid match. We evaluate performance relative to state-of-the-art alternatives. Feature description for local image patch is widely used in computer vision. While the conventional way to design local descriptor is based on expert experience and knowledge, learning-based methods for designing local descriptor become more and more popular because of their good performance and data-driven property. This paper proposes a novel data-driven method for designing binary feature descriptor, which we call receptive fields descriptor (RFD). Technically, RFD is constructed by thresholding responses of a set of receptive fields, which are selected from a large number of candidates according to their distinctiveness and correlations in a greedy way. Using two different kinds of receptive fields (namely rectangular pooling area and Gaussian pooling area) for selection, we obtain two binary descriptors @math and @math .accordingly. Image matching experiments on the well-known patch data set and Oxford data set demonstrate that RFD significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art binary descriptors, and is comparable with the best float-valued descriptors at a fraction of processing time. Finally, experiments on object recognition tasks confirm that both @math and @math successfully bridge the performance gap between binary descriptors and their floating-point competitors.