An elliptical sampling based fast and robust feature descriptor for image matching

Local features of an image provide a robust way of image matching if they are invariant to large variations in scale, viewpoint, illumination, rotation, and affine transformations. In this paper, we propose a novel feature descriptor based on circular and elliptical local sampling of image pixels to attain fast and robust results under varying imaging conditions. The proposed descriptor is tested on a standard benchmark dataset comprising of images with varying imaging conditions and compression quality. Results show that the proposed method generates sufficient or more number of stable and correct matches between an image pair (original image and distorted image) as compared to SIFT with a speedup of 1.6 on average basis. The paper also discusses the reason of choosing SIFT descriptor for comparison and its efficacy in different scenarios. The paper also reasons the robustness of hand crafted feature descriptors and why they hold an upper hand among many other deep learning methods.