text: Accuracy, descriptor size, and the time required for extraction and matching are all important factors when selecting local image descriptors. To optimize over all these requirements, this paper presents a CUDA port for the recent Learned Arrangement of Three Patches (LATCH) binary descriptors to the GPU platform. The design of LATCH makes it well suited for GPU processing. Owing to its small size and binary nature, the GPU can further be used to efficiently match LATCH features. Taken together, this leads to breakneck descriptor extraction and matching speeds. We evaluate the trade off between these speeds and the quality of results in a feature matching intensive application. To this end, we use our proposed CUDA LATCH (CLATCH) to recover structure from motion (SfM), comparing 3D reconstructions and speed using different representations. Our results show that CLATCH provides high quality 3D reconstructions at fractions of the time required by other representations, with little, if any, loss of reconstruction quality.
  @cite_30: Feature matching is at the base of many computer vision problems, such as object recognition or structure from motion. Current methods rely on costly descriptors for detection and matching. In this paper, we propose a very fast binary descriptor based on BRIEF, called ORB, which is rotation invariant and resistant to noise. We demonstrate through experiments how ORB is at two orders of magnitude faster than SIFT, while performing as well in many situations. The efficiency is tested on several real-world applications, including object detection and patch-tracking on a smart phone.
  @cite_13: A large number of vision applications rely on matching keypoints across images. The last decade featured an arms-race towards faster and more robust keypoints and association algorithms: Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT)[17], Speed-up Robust Feature (SURF)[4], and more recently Binary Robust Invariant Scalable Keypoints (BRISK)[I6] to name a few. These days, the deployment of vision algorithms on smart phones and embedded devices with low memory and computation complexity has even upped the ante: the goal is to make descriptors faster to compute, more compact while remaining robust to scale, rotation and noise. To best address the current requirements, we propose a novel keypoint descriptor inspired by the human visual system and more precisely the retina, coined Fast Retina Keypoint (FREAK). A cascade of binary strings is computed by efficiently comparing image intensities over a retinal sampling pattern. Our experiments show that FREAKs are in general faster to compute with lower memory load and also more robust than SIFT, SURF or BRISK. They are thus competitive alternatives to existing keypoints in particular for embedded applications.
  @cite_8: We propose a novel and fast multiscale feature detection and description approach that exploits the benefits of nonlinear scale spaces. Previous attempts to detect and describe features in nonlinear scale spaces such as KAZE [1] and BFSIFT [6] are highly time consuming due to the computational burden of creating the nonlinear scale space. In this paper we propose to use recent numerical schemes called Fast Explicit Diffusion (FED) [3, 4] embedded in a pyramidal framework to dramatically speed-up feature detection in nonlinear scale spaces. In addition, we introduce a Modified-Local Difference Binary (M-LDB) descriptor that is highly efficient, exploits gradient information from the nonlinear scale space, is scale and rotation invariant and has low storage requirements. Our features are called Accelerated-KAZE (A-KAZE) due to the dramatic speed-up introduced by FED schemes embedded in a pyramidal framework.
  @cite_24: The efficiency and quality of a feature descriptor are critical to the user experience of many computer vision applications. However, the existing descriptors are either too computationally expensive to achieve real-time performance, or not sufficiently distinctive to identify correct matches from a large database with various transformations. In this paper, we propose a highly efficient 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 and a salient bit-selection method are applied to capture the distinct patterns of the patch at different spatial granularities. Experimental results demonstrate that compared to the existing state-of-the-art binary descriptors, primarily designed for speed, LDB has similar construction efficiency, while achieving a greater accuracy and faster speed for mobile object recognition and tracking tasks.
  @cite_19: We propose to use binary strings as an efficient feature point descriptor, which we call BRIEF. We show that it is highly discriminative even when using relatively few bits and can be computed using simple intensity difference tests. Furthermore, the descriptor similarity can be evaluated using the Hamming distance, which is very efficient to compute, instead of the L2 norm as is usually done. As a result, BRIEF is very fast both to build and to match. We compare it against SURF and U-SURF on standard benchmarks and show that it yields a similar or better recognition performance, while running in a fraction of the time required by either.
  @cite_0: In this paper we propose a novel approach to generate a binary descriptor optimized for each image patch independently. The approach is inspired by the linear discriminant embedding that simultaneously increases inter and decreases intra class distances. A set of discriminative and uncorrelated binary tests is established from all possible tests in an offline training process. The patch adapted descriptors are then efficiently built online from a subset of tests which lead to lower intra class distances thus a more robust descriptor. A patch descriptor consists of two binary strings where one represents the results of the tests and the other indicates the subset of the patch-related robust tests that are used for calculating a masked Hamming distance. Our experiments on three different benchmarks demonstrate improvements in matching performance, and illustrate that per-patch optimization outperforms global optimization.
  @cite_10: Effective and efficient generation of keypoints from an image is a well-studied problem in the literature and forms the basis of numerous Computer Vision applications. Established leaders in the field are the SIFT and SURF algorithms which exhibit great performance under a variety of image transformations, with SURF in particular considered as the most computationally efficient amongst the high-performance methods to date. In this paper we propose BRISK1, a novel method for keypoint detection, description and matching. A comprehensive evaluation on benchmark datasets reveals BRISK's adaptive, high quality performance as in state-of-the-art algorithms, albeit at a dramatically lower computational cost (an order of magnitude faster than SURF in cases). The key to speed lies in the application of a novel scale-space FAST-based detector in combination with the assembly of a bit-string descriptor from intensity comparisons retrieved by dedicated sampling of each keypoint neighborhood.
  @cite_25: 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 and compromise their 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.
  @cite_17: 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.
summary: One of the first binary descriptors was the Binary Robust Independent Elementary Features (BRIEF) @cite_19 , soon followed by the Oriented fast and Rotated BRIEF (ORB) descriptor @cite_30 which added rotation invariance, the Binary Robust Invariant Scalable Keypoints (BRISK) @cite_10 which used a more effective pixel sampling pattern, and the Fast REtinA Keypoint descriptor (FREAK) @cite_13 which sampled intensities using a pattern similar to the one found in human retinas. The Accelerated-KAZE (A-KAZE) was suggested in @cite_8 . It builds on the earlier Local Difference Binary (LDB) descriptor @cite_17 @cite_24 by computing the binary descriptor values from mean image intensities over a range of patch sizes. The binary online learned descriptor (BOLD) @cite_0 improve accuracy yet retain high processing speeds. Finally and very recently, the LATCH binary descriptors were proposed in @cite_25 . We defer discussion of LATCH to Sec. .