A tutorial on binary descriptors – part 3 – The ORB descriptor（转）

A tutorial on binary descriptors – part 3 – The ORB descriptor

This third post in our series about binary descriptors that will talk about the ORB descriptor [1]. We had an introduction to patch descriptors, an introduction to binary descriptors and a post about the BRIEF [2] descriptor.

We’ll start by showing the following figure that shows an example of using ORB to match between real world images with viewpoint change. Green lines are valid matches, red circles indicate unmatched points.

ORB descriptor – An example of keypoints matching using ORB

 

Now, as you may recall from the previous posts, a binary descriptor is composed out of three parts:

1. A sampling pattern: where to sample points in the region around the descriptor.
2. Orientation compensation: some mechanism to measure the orientation of the keypoint and rotate it to compensate for rotation changes.
3. Sampling pairs: the pairs to compare when building the final descriptor.

Recall that to build the binary string representing a region around a keypoint we need to go over all the pairs and for each pair (p1, p2) – if the intensity at point p1 is greater than the intensity at point p2, we write 1 in the binary string and 0 otherwise.

The ORB descriptor is a bit similar to BRIEF. It doesn’t have an elaborate sampling pattern as BRISK [3] or FREAK [4]. However, there are two main differences between ORB and BRIEF:

1. ORB uses an orientation compensation mechanism, making it rotation invariant.
2. ORB learns the optimal sampling pairs, whereas BRIEF uses randomly chosen sampling pairs.

Orientation Compensation

ORB uses a simple measure of corner orientation – the intensity centroid [5]. First, the moments of a patch are defined as:

ORB descriptor-Patch’s moments definition

With these moments we can find the centroid, the “center of mass” of the patch as:

ORB descriptor – Center of mass of the patch

We can construct a vector from the corner’s center O, to the centroid -OC. The orientation of the patch is then given by:

ORB descriptor – Orientation of the patch

Here is an illustration to help explain the method:

ORB descriptor – Angle calculation illustration

Once we’ve calculated the orientation of the patch, we can rotate it to a canonical rotation and then compute the descriptor, thus obtaining some rotation invariance.

Learning the sampling pairs

There are two properties we would like our sampling pairs to have. One is uncorrelation – we would like that the sampling pairs will be uncorrelated so that each new pair will bring new information to the descriptor, thus maximizing the amount of information the descriptor carries. The other is high variance of the pairs – high variance makes a feature more discriminative, since it responds differently to inputs.

The authors of ORB suggest learning the sampling pairs to ensure they have these two properties. A simple calculation [1] shows that there are about 205,000 possible tests (sampling pairs) to consider. From that vast amount of tests, only 256 tests will be chosen.

The learning is done as follows. First, they set a training set of about 300,000 keypoints drawn from the PASCAL 2006 dataset [6].Next, we apply the following greedy algorithm:

1. Run each test against all training patches.
2. Order the tests by their distance from a mean of 0.5, forming the vector T.
3. Greedy search:
   1. Put the first test into the result vector R and remove it from T.
   2. Take the next test from T, and compare it against all tests in R. If its absolute correlation is greater than a threshold, discard it; else, add it to R.
   3. Repeat the previous step until there are 256 tests in R. If there are fewer than 256, raise the threshold and try again.

Once this algorithm terminates, we obtain a set of 256 relatively uncorrelated tests with high variance.

To conclude, ORB is binary descriptor that is similar to BRIEF, with the added advantages of rotation invariance and learned sampling pairs. You’re probably asking yourself, how does ORB perform in comparison to BRIEF? Well, in non-geometric transformation (those that are image capture dependent and do not rely on the viewpoint, such as blur, JPEG compression, exposure and illumination) BRIEF actually outperforms ORB. In affine transformation, BRIEF perform poorly under large rotation or scale change as it’s not designed to handle such changes. In perspective transformations, which are the result of view-point change, BRIEF surprisingly slightly outperforms ORB. For further details, refer to [7] or wait for the last post in this tutorial which will give a performance evaluation of the binary descriptors.

The next post will talk about BRISK [3] that was actually presented in the same conference as ORB. It presents some difference from BRIEF and ORB by using a hand-crafted sampling pattern.

Gil.

References:

[1] Rublee, Ethan, et al. “ORB: an efficient alternative to SIFT or SURF.” Computer Vision (ICCV), 2011 IEEE International Conference on. IEEE, 2011.‏

[2] Calonder, Michael, et al. “Brief: Binary robust independent elementary features.” Computer Vision–ECCV 2010. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2010. 778-792.‏

[3] Leutenegger, Stefan, Margarita Chli, and Roland Y. Siegwart. “BRISK: Binary robust invariant scalable keypoints.” Computer Vision (ICCV), 2011 IEEE International Conference on. IEEE, 2011.‏

[4] Alahi, Alexandre, Raphael Ortiz, and Pierre Vandergheynst. “Freak: Fast retina keypoint.” Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2012 IEEE Conference on. IEEE, 2012.‏

[5] Rosin, Paul L. “Measuring corner properties.” Computer Vision and Image Understanding 73.2 (1999): 291-307.‏

[6] M. Everingham. The PASCAL Visual Object Classes Challenge 2006 (VOC2006) Results. http://pascallin.ecs.soton.ac.uk/challenges/VOC/databases.html.

[7] Heinly, Jared, Enrique Dunn, and Jan-Michael Frahm. “Comparative evaluation of binary features.” Computer Vision–ECCV 2012. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2012. 759-773.‏

原文链接：https://gilscvblog.com/2013/10/04/a-tutorial-on-binary-descriptors-part-3-the-orb-descriptor/