Chapter 5. Focusing on the Interesting 2D Features

In most images, the most useful information is around certain zones that typically correspond to salient points and regions. In most applications, local processing around these salient points is sufficient as long as these points are stable and distinctive. In this chapter, we will cover a basic introduction to the 2D salient points and features offered by OpenCV. It is important to note the difference between detectors and descriptors. Detectors only extract interest points (local features) on an image, while descriptors obtain relevant information about the neighborhood of these points. Descriptors, as their name suggests, describe the image by proper features. They describe an interest point in a way that is invariant to change in lighting and to small perspective deformations. This can be used to match them with other descriptors (typically extracted from other images). For this purpose, matchers are used. This, in turn, can be used to detect objects and infer the camera transformation between two images. First, we show the internal structure of the interest points and provide an explanation of the 2D features and descriptor extraction. Finally, the chapter deals with matching, that is, putting 2D features of different images into correspondence.

Interest points

Local features, also called interest points, are characterized by sudden changes of intensity in the region. These local features are usually classified in edges, corners, and blobs. OpenCV encapsulates interesting point information in the KeyPoint class, which contains the following data:

  • The coordinates of the interest point (the Point2f type)
  • Diameter of the meaningful keypoint neighborhood
  • Orientation of the keypoint
  • Strength of the keypoint, which depends on the keypoint detector that is selected
  • Pyramid layer (octave) from which the keypoint has been extracted; octaves are used in some descriptors such as SIFT, SURF, FREAK, or BRISK
  • Object ID used to perform clustering
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