SRP‐AKAZE: an improved accelerated KAZE algorithm based on sparse random projection

Abstract

The AKAZE algorithm is a typical image registration algorithm that has the advantage of high computational efficiency based on non‐linear diffusion. However, it is weaker than the scale‐invariant feature transformation (SIFT) algorithm in terms of robustness and stability. We propose a new and improved version of the AKAZE algorithm by using the SIFT descriptor based on sparse random projection (SRP). The proposed method not only retains the advantage of high efficiency of the AKAZE algorithm in feature detection but also has the stability of the SIFT descriptor. Moreover, the computational complexity due to the high dimension of the SIFT descriptor, which limits the speed of feature matching, is drastically reduced by the SRP strategy. Experiments on several benchmark image datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the stability of the AKAZE algorithm, and the results suggest the better matching performance and robustness of the feature descriptor.

Keywords

• SRP-AKAZE
• improved accelerated KAZE algorithm
• sparse random projection
• typical image registration algorithm
• high computational efficiency
• nonlinear diffusion