VL_COVDET() implements a number of co-variant feature detectors (e.g., DoG, Harris-Affine, Harris-Laplace) and corresponding feature descriptors (SIFT, raw patches).

F = VL_COVDET(I) detects upright scale and translation covariant features based on the Difference of Gaussian (Dog) cornerness measure from image I (a grayscale image of class SINGLE). Each column of F is an oriented ellipse (see VL_PLOTFRAME() for the definition) even if features are upright and/or not affine covariant (in which case unoriented/circular may suffice).

VL_COVDET(I, 'Method', METHOD) allows using one of the following detection methods instead of the default one:

DoG default

The Difference of Gaussians is an approximate version of the multiscale trace of Laplacian operator [1].

Hessian

Determinant of Hessian operator [2].

HessianLaplace

Determinant of Hessian for space localization, trace of Laplacian for scale detection [2].

HarrisLaplace

Harris cornerness measure for space localization, trace of Laplacian for scale detection [2].

MultiscaleHessian

Same as HessianLaplace, but Laplacian scale detection is not performend (features are simply detected at multiple scales) [2].

MultiscaleHarris

Same as HarrisLaplace, but Laplacian scale detection is not performend (features are simply detected at multiple scales) [2].

The number of detected features is affected by the 'PeakThreshold' option, which sets the minimum absolute vale of the cornerness measure to accept a feature. A larger threshold causes fewer features to be extracted. A good way to choose a threshold is to look at the cornerness score of the features extracted from an example image. This score is returned as part of the INFO structure, as explained below.

In addition to the absolute value of the cornerness measure, features are also filtered by the curvature of the latter. This is controlled by the 'EdgeThreshold' parameter, which is the upper bound on the ratio of the maximum over the minimum curvature of the cornerness measure at the location of the detected feature. Intuitively, a low ratio corresponds to an elongated valley in the cornerness score map, which usually arises from image edges. These locations are usually discarded as they tend to be unstable.

Some corner detectors (e.g. HarrisLaplace) use peak in the response of the multi-scale Laplace operator to select the scale of the detected frames. These peaks are filtered by a threshold adjustable by using the 'LaplacianPeakThreshold' option.

VL_COVDET(..., 'EstimateAffineShape', true) switches on affine adaptation, an algorithm [2] that attempts to estimate the affine covariant shape of each feature.

VL_COVDET(..., 'EstimateOrientation', true) switches on the estimation of the orientation of the features. The algorithm looks for one or more dominant orientations of the gradient in a patch around the feature as in [1]. Note that more than one orientation can be associated to each detected feature, creating multiple versions of the same feature with different orientations. The maximum number of orientations per feature can be set with MaxNumOrientations option.

VL_COVDET(..., 'Frames', F) uses the user specified frames F instead of running a detector. The estimation of the affine shape and of the feature orientation can still be performed starting from such frames. Moreover, descriptors for these frames can be computed.

[F,D] = VL_COVDET(I, ...) computes the SIFT descriptors [1] for the detected features. Each column of D is the descriptor of the corresponding frame in F. A descriptor is a 128-dimensional vector of class SINGLE. The same format of VL_SIFT() is used. SIFT features are computed on normalized image patches that are affected by the parameters explained next (for example, in order to compute SIFT on a larger measurement region, increase the value of PatchRelativeExtent).

[F,D] = VL_COVDET(I, 'descriptor', DESCRIPTOR) allows using one following descriptors instead

SIFT default

The SIFT descriptor.

LIOP

The Local Intensity Order Pattern descriptor. See VL_LIOP() for the parameters affecting this descriptor. All LIOP parameters can be used as input to VL_COVDET(), prefixed by the 'Liop' string (e.g. 'LiopIntensityThrehsold').

Patch

Raw patches. In this case, each column of D is a stacked square image patch. This is very useful to compute alternative user-defined descriptors.

The following parameters can be used to control the produced descriptors:

PatchResolution 15 (SIFT) or 20 (LIOP, Patch)

The size of the patch R in pixel. Specifically, the patch is a square image of side 2*R+1 pixels.

PatchRelativeExtent 7.5 (SIFT), 10 (LIOP), or 6 (Patch)

The extent E of the patch in the normalized feature frame. The normalized feature frame is mapped to the feature frame F detected in the image by a certain affine transformation (A,T) (see VL_PLOTFRAME() for details). The patch is a square [-E, E]^2 in the normalize frame, and its shape in the original image is the (A,T) of it.

PatchRelativeSmoothing 1 (SIFT and LIOP), 1.2 (Patch)

The smoothing SIGMA of the patch in the normalized feature frame. Conceptually, the normalized patch is computed by warping the image (thought as a continuous signal) by the inverse of the affine transformation (A,T) discussed above, then by smoothing the wrapped image by a 2D isotropic Gaussian of standard deviation SIGMA, and finally by sampling the resulting signal.

[F,D,INFO] = VL_COVDET(...) returns an additional structure INFO with the following members:

info.peakScores

The peak scores of the detected features.

info.edgeScores

The edge scores of the detected features.

info.orientationScores

The peak score of the gradient orientation histograms used to assign an orientation to the detected features.

info.laplacianScaleScores

The peak score of the Laplacian measure used to select the scale of the detected features.

info.gss

The Gaussian scale space (see VL_PLOTSS()).

info.css

The cornerness measure scale space (see VL_PLOTSS()).

In addition to the ones discussed so far, the function supports the following options:

NumOctaves maximum possible

The number of scale levels sampled per octave when constructing the scale spaces.

BaseScale 1.6

Gaussian Scale Space pyramid base scale. Sets up the blur which is being applied to the image as sqrt(BS^2 - 0.5^2) where BS is the value of the base scale and 0.5 is the initial image blur.

OctaveResolution 3

The number of scale levels sampled per octave when constructing the scale spaces.

DoubleImage true

Whether to double the image before extracting features. This allows to detect features at minimum smoothing level (scale) of 0.5 pixels rather than 1.0, resulting in many more small features being detected.

MaxNumOrientations 4

Maximum number of orientations per feature when EstimateOrientation is true.

Set to false to drop all features where measurement region gets out of the input image.

Verbose

If specified, it increases the verbosity level.

REFERENCES

[1] D. G. Lowe, Distinctive image features from scale-invariant keypoints. IJCV, vol. 2, no. 60, pp. 91-110, 2004.

[2] K. Mikolajcyk and C. Schmid, An affine invariant interest point detector. ICCV, vol. 2350, pp. 128-142, 2002.