Unbiased evaluation of keypoint detectors with respect to rotation invariance

Abstract

The authors present the results of a comparative performance study of algorithms for detecting keypoints in digital images. The Harris, good features to track (GFTT), SIFT, SURF, FAST, ORB, BRISK, and the MSER keypoint detectors were tested using two types of images: POV‐Ray simulated images and photographs from the Caltech 256 image dataset. They tested the repeatability of detection of the image keypoints for the evaluated detectors for a series of images with one degree rotations from 0 to 180° (3982 images in total). In the evaluation scenario they adopted an original approach in which they did not hold back a single image to be the reference image. They conclude that the most computationally complex detector, i.e. the SIFT performs best under rotation transformation of images. However, the FAST and ORB detectors, while being less computationally demanding, perform almost equally well. Hence, they can be viable choices in image processing tasks for mobile applications.

Keywords

• unbiased evaluation
• rotation invariance
• digital images
• GFTT keypoint detectors
• SIFT keypoint detectors
• SURF keypoint detectors