In this paper, we propose a simple way to utilize stereo camera data to improve feature descriptors. Computer vision algorithms that use a stereo camera require some calculations of 3D information. We leverage this pre-calculated information to improve feature descriptor algorithms. We use the 3D feature information to estimate the scale of each feature. This way, each feature descriptor will be more robust to scale change without significant computations. In addition, we use stereo images to construct the descriptor vector. The SIFT and FREAK descriptors are used to evaluate the proposed method. The scale normalization technique in feature tracking test improves the standard SIFT by 8.75 and improves the standard FREAK by 28.65 . We also use a simple visual odometry algorithm and test it on the KITTI datasets. The stereo FREAK descriptor raises the number of inlier matches by 19 and consequently improves the accuracy of visual odometry by 23 .
One of the well-known and robust feature descriptors is . It has been successfully used for more than one decade in many applications including visual odometry, scene reconstruction, object recognition, etc. The descriptor vector contains 128 floating point numbers. The main issue with the descriptor is its computation and matching times. In real-time applications such as visual odometry or Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (), time limitation is a serious challenge. Moreover, in , it is needed to store feature descriptor vectors in order to find loop closure which is the main step of the path optimization. Therefore, the size of the descriptor vector is very important. The descriptor, which is a fast version of , constructs a 64-D descriptor vector and reduces the computation time compared to the descriptor. However, it still has high computation and matching time. @cite_16 showed that using dimensionality reduction techniques such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) or Linear Discriminant Embedding (LDE) can reduce descriptor size without any loss in recognition performance. Another way to reduce the descriptor vector size has been presented by @cite_13 . They took advantage of a quantization method to use only 4 bits to store floating numbers of the descriptor.
@cite_16 @cite_13
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Visual search and image retrieval underpin numerous applications, however the task is still challenging predominantly due to the variability of object appearance and ever increasing size of the databases, often exceeding billions of images. Prior art methods rely on aggregation of local scale-invariant descriptors, such as SIFT, via mechanisms including Bag of Visual Words (BoW), Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors (VLAD) and Fisher Vectors (FV). However, their performance is still short of what is required. This paper presents a novel method for deriving a compact and distinctive representation of image content called Robust Visual Descriptor with Whitening (RVD-W). It significantly advances the state of the art and delivers world-class performance. In our approach local descriptors are rank-assigned to multiple clusters. Residual vectors are then computed in each cluster, normalized using a direction-preserving normalization function and aggregated based on the neighborhood rank. Importantly, the residual vectors are de-correlated and whitened in each cluster before aggregation, leading to a balanced energy distribution in each dimension and significantly improved performance. We also propose a new post-PCA normalization approach which improves separability between the matching and non-matching global descriptors. This new normalization benefits not only our RVD-W descriptor but also improves existing approaches based on FV and VLAD aggregation. Furthermore, we show that the aggregation framework developed using hand-crafted SIFT features also performs exceptionally well with Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based features. The RVD-W pipeline outperforms state-of-the-art global descriptors on both the Holidays and Oxford datasets. On the large scale datasets, Holidays1M and Oxford1M, SIFT-based RVD-W representation obtains a mAP of 45.1 and 35.1 percent, while CNN-based RVD-W achieve a mAP of 63.5 and 44.8 percent, all yielding superior performance to the state-of-the-art. 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 efficiency, robustness and distinctiveness of a feature descriptor are critical to the user experience and scalability of a mobile Augmented Reality (AR) system. However, existing descriptors are either too compute-expensive to achieve real-time performance on a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet, or not sufficiently robust and distinctive to identify correct matches from a large database. As a result, current mobile AR systems still only have limited capabilities, which greatly restrict their deployment in practice. In this paper, we propose a highly efficient, robust and distinctive binary descriptor, called Local Difference Binary (LDB). LDB directly computes a binary string for an image patch using simple intensity and gradient difference tests on pairwise grid cells within the patch. A multiple gridding strategy is applied to capture the distinct patterns of the patch at different spatial granularities. Experimental results demonstrate that LDB is extremely fast to compute and to match against a large database due to its high robustness and distinctiveness. Comparing to the state-of-the-art binary descriptor BRIEF, primarily designed for speed, LDB has similar computational efficiency, while achieves a greater accuracy and 5x faster matching speed when matching over a large database with 1.7M+ descriptors. A good feature descriptor is desired to be discriminative, robust, and computationally inexpensive in both terms of time and storage requirement. In the domain of face recognition, these properties allow the system to quickly deliver high recognition results to the end user. Motivated by the recent feature descriptor called Patterns of Oriented Edge Magnitudes (POEM), which balances the three concerns, this paper aims at enhancing its performance with respect to all these criteria. To this end, we first optimize the parameters of POEM and then apply the whitened principal-component-analysis dimensionality reduction technique to get a more compact, robust, and discriminative descriptor. For face recognition, the efficiency of our algorithm is proved by strong results obtained on both constrained (Face Recognition Technology, FERET) and unconstrained (Labeled Faces in the Wild, LFW) data sets in addition with the low complexity. Impressively, our algorithm is about 30 times faster than those based on Gabor filters. Furthermore, by proposing an additional technique that makes our descriptor robust to rotation, we validate its efficiency for the task of image matching.