Scale-invariant feature transform

The scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) is an algorithm in computer vision to detect and describe local features in images. The algorithm was patented in the US by the University of British Columbia and published by David Lowe in 1999.

Applications include object recognition, robotic mapping and navigation, image stitching, 3D modeling, gesture recognition, video tracking, individual identification of wildlife and match moving.

For any object in an image, interesting points on the object can be extracted to provide a "feature description" of the object. This description, extracted from a training image, can then be used to identify the object when attempting to locate the object in a test image containing many other objects. To perform reliable recognition, it is important that the features extracted from the training image be detectable even under changes in image scale, noise and illumination. Such points usually lie on high-contrast regions of the image, such as object edges.

Another important characteristic of these features is that the relative positions between them in the original scene shouldn't change from one image to another. For example, if only the four corners of a door were used as features, they would work regardless of the door's position; but if points in the frame were also used, the recognition would fail if the door is opened or closed. Similarly, features located in articulated or flexible objects would typically not work if any change in their internal geometry happens between two images in the set being processed. However, in practice SIFT detects and uses a much larger number of features from the images, which reduces the contribution of the errors caused by these local variations in the average error of all feature matching errors.

SIFT can robustly identify objects even among clutter and under partial occlusion, because the SIFT feature descriptor is invariant to uniform scaling, orientation, illumination changes, and partially invariant to affine distortion. This section summarizes the original SIFT algorithm and mentions a few competing techniques available for object recognition under clutter and partial occlusion.

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