Keypoint localization - repeatable, precise, and interesting (distinct) - corner detection!!!

  • Look for 2D signal changes

  • The Image gradient around a corner has 2+ dominant directions

    • repeatable and distinctive
    • significant change in all directions
  • Corners are distinctive key-points

    • x and y derivatives are large
  • but how do we generalize corners to any direction?

formulation

  • Find windows/patches that result in large change of pixel values when shifted in any direction

  • E can be rewritten as
  • M is at every pixel, window function (to only look within window) multiplied with matrix comprised of gradient wrt x and wrt y
  • expression E for change in intensity function - also equation for an ellipse?

  • when the diagonals of M are large, it becomes more like a circle..? ( every direction is large )

  • a rotated corner is an axis-aligned corner rotated
    • if we just look at the scale of the eigenvalues, we can tell if something is a corner regardless of its rotation
    • lambda1 and lambda2 will be large

summary

  1. compute x and y derivatives of image
  2. compute products of derivatives at each pixel
  3. compute matrix M at each pixel
  4. compute corner response at each pixel
  5. output corner response map

Properties

  • Results are good for finding correspondence matches between images

  • has

    • translation invariance
    • rotation invariance
    • not invariant to scale
      • in a bigger image, the points would be classified as edges