Introduction to SIFT (Scale-Invariant Feature Transform)

Goal

In this chapter
- We will learn about the concepts of SIFT algorithm.
- We will learn to find SIFT Keypoints and Descriptors.

Theory

In last couple of chapters, we saw some corner detectors like Harris etc. They are rotation-invariant, which means, even if the image is rotated, we can find the same corners. It is obvious because corners remain corners in rotated image also. But what about scaling? A corner may not be a corner if the image is scaled. For example, check a simple image below. A corner in a small image within a small window is flat when it is zoomed in the same window. So Harris corner is not scale invariant.

Scale-Invariance
So, in 2004, D.Lowe, University of British Columbia, came up with a new algorithm, Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) in his paper, Distinctive Image Features from Scale-Invariant Keypoints, which extract keypoints and compute its descriptors. (This paper is easy to understand and considered to be best material available on SIFT. So this explanation is just a short summary of this paper).

There are mainly four steps involved in SIFT algorithm. We will see them one-by-one.

1. Scale-space Extrema Detection

From the image above, it is obvious that we can’t use the same window to detect keypoints with different scale. It is OK with small corner. But to detect larger corners we need larger windows. For this, scale-space filtering is used. In it, Laplacian of Gaussian is found for the image with various $\sigma$ values. LoG acts as a blob detector which detects blobs in various sizes due to change in $\sigma$. In short, σ