Illumination-invariant feature point detection based on neighborhood information

Feature point detection is the basis of computer vision, and the detection methods with geometric invariance and illumination invariance are the key and difficult problem in the field of feature detection. This paper proposes an illumination-invariant feature point detection method based on neighborhood information. The method can be summarized into two steps. Firstly, the feature points are divided into eight types according to the number of connected neighbors. Secondly, each type of feature points is classified again according to the position distribution of neighboring pixels. The theoretical deduction proves that the proposed method has lower computational complexity than other methods. The experimental results indicate that, when the photometric variation of the two images is very large, the feature-based detection methods are usually inferior, while the learning-based detection methods performs better. However, our method performs better than the learning-based detection method in terms of the number of feature points, the number of matching points, and the repeatability rate stability. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has the best illumination robustness among state-of-the-art feature detection methods.