Performance Evaluation of Local Descriptors for Affine Invariant Region Detector

Local feature descriptors are widely used in many computer vision applications. Over the past couple of decades, several local feature descriptors have been proposed which are robust to challenging conditions. Since they show different characteristics in different environment, it is necessary to evaluate their performance in an intensive and consistent manner. However, there has been no relevant work that addresses this problem, especially for the affine invariant region detectors which are popularly used in object recognition and classification. In this paper, we present a useful and rigorous performance evaluation of local descriptors for affine invariant region detector, in which MSER (maximally stable extremal regions) detector is employed. We intensively evaluate local patch based descriptors as well as binary descriptors, including SIFT (scale invariant feature transform), SURF (speeded up robust features), BRIEF (binary robust independent elementary features), FREAK (fast retina keypoint), Shape descriptor, and LIOP (local intensity order pattern). Intensive evaluation on standard dataset shows that LIOP outperforms the other descriptors in terms of precision and recall metric.