Scale Invariant Feature Transform

Abstract

Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) is an image descriptor for image-based matching developed by David Lowe (1999,2004). This descriptor as well as related image descriptors are used for a large number of purposes in computer vision related to point matching between different views of a 3-D scene and view-based object recognition. The SIFT descriptor is invariant to translations, rotations and scaling transformations in the image domain and robust to moderate perspective transformations and illumination variations. Experimentally, the SIFT descriptor has been proven to be very useful in practice for robust image matching and object recognition under real-world conditions. In its original formulation, the SIFT descriptor comprised a method for detecting interest points from a grey-level image at which statistics of local gradient directions of image intensities were accumulated to give a summarizing description of the local image structures in a local neighbourhood around each interest point, with the intention that this descriptor should be used for matching corresponding interest points between different images. Later, the SIFT descriptor has also been applied at dense grids (dense SIFT) which have been shown to lead to better performance for tasks such as object categorization and texture classification. The SIFT descriptor has also been extended from grey-level to colour images and from 2-D spatial images to 2+1-D spatio-temporal video.