We present a novel means of describing local image appearances using binary strings. Binary descriptors have drawn increasing interest in recent years due to their speed and low memory footprint. A known shortcoming of these representations is their inferior performance compared to larger, histogram based descriptors such as the SIFT. Our goal is to close this performance gap while maintaining the benefits attributed to binary representations. To this end we propose the Learned Arrangements of Three Patch Codes descriptors, or LATCH. Our key observation is that existing binary descriptors are at an increased risk from noise and local appearance variations. This, as they compare the values of pixel pairs; changes to either of the pixels can easily lead to changes in descriptor values, hence damaging its performance. In order to provide more robustness, we instead propose a novel means of comparing pixel patches. This ostensibly small change, requires a substantial redesign of the descriptors themselves and how they are produced. Our resulting LATCH representation is rigorously compared to state-of-the-art binary descriptors and shown to provide far better performance for similar computation and space requirements.
A somewhat different descriptor design approach was proposed by @cite_19 . Their LDA-Hash representation extracts SIFT descriptors from the image, projects them to a more discriminant space and then thresholds the projected descriptors to obtain binary representations. Though the final representation is a binary descriptor, producing it requires extracting SIFT descriptors, making the representation slower than its pure binary alternatives. To alleviate some of this computational cost, the DBRIEF @cite_24 representation projects patch intensities directly. The projections are further computed as a linear combination of a small number of simple filters from a given dictionary. Finally, the BinBoost representation of @cite_1 @cite_26 also learns a set of hash functions that correspond to each bit in the final descriptor. Hash functions are learned using boosting and implemented as a sign operation on a linear combination of non linear week classifiers which are gradient based image features.
@cite_24 @cite_19 @cite_26 @cite_1
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Binary descriptors of image patches are increasingly popular given that they require less storage and enable faster processing. This, however, comes at a price of lower recognition performances. To boost these performances, we project the image patches to a more discriminative subspace, and threshold their coordinates to build our binary descriptor. However, applying complex projections to the patches is slow, which negates some of the advantages of binary descriptors. Hence, our key idea is to learn the discriminative projections so that they can be decomposed into a small number of simple filters for which the responses can be computed fast. We show that with as few as 32 bits per descriptor we outperform the state-of-the-art binary descriptors in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. SIFT-like local feature descriptors are ubiquitously employed in computer vision applications such as content-based retrieval, video analysis, copy detection, object recognition, photo tourism, and 3D reconstruction. Feature descriptors can be designed to be invariant to certain classes of photometric and geometric transformations, in particular, affine and intensity scale transformations. However, real transformations that an image can undergo can only be approximately modeled in this way, and thus most descriptors are only approximately invariant in practice. Second, descriptors are usually high dimensional (e.g., SIFT is represented as a 128-dimensional vector). In large-scale retrieval and matching problems, this can pose challenges in storing and retrieving descriptor data. We map the descriptor vectors into the Hamming space in which the Hamming metric is used to compare the resulting representations. This way, we reduce the size of the descriptors by representing them as short binary strings and learn descriptor invariance from examples. We show extensive experimental validation, demonstrating the advantage of the proposed approach. We propose a novel and general framework to learn compact but highly discriminative floating-point and binary local feature descriptors. By leveraging the boosting-trick we first show how to efficiently train a compact floating-point descriptor that is very robust to illumination and viewpoint changes. We then present the main contribution of this paper—a binary extension of the framework that demonstrates the real advantage of our approach and allows us to compress the descriptor even further. Each bit of the resulting binary descriptor, which we call BinBoost, is computed with a boosted binary hash function, and we show how to efficiently optimize the hash functions so that they are complementary, which is key to compactness and robustness. As we do not put any constraints on the weak learner configuration underlying each hash function, our general framework allows us to optimize the sampling patterns of recently proposed hand-crafted descriptors and significantly improve their performance. Moreover, our boosting scheme can easily adapt to new applications and generalize to other types of image data, such as faces, while providing state-of-the-art results at a fraction of the matching time and memory footprint. Binary key point descriptors provide an efficient alternative to their floating-point competitors as they enable faster processing while requiring less memory. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to learn an extremely compact binary descriptor we call Bin Boost that is very robust to illumination and viewpoint changes. Each bit of our descriptor is computed with a boosted binary hash function, and we show how to efficiently optimize the different hash functions so that they complement each other, which is key to compactness and robustness. The hash functions rely on weak learners that are applied directly to the image patches, which frees us from any intermediate representation and lets us automatically learn the image gradient pooling configuration of the final descriptor. Our resulting descriptor significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art binary descriptors and performs similarly to the best floating-point descriptors at a fraction of the matching time and memory footprint.