Low-bitrate benefits of JPEG compression on sift recognition

Feature detection and image matching are two important tasks in photogrammetry. Their application continues to grow in a various fields, from simple photogrammetry tasks such as feature recognition, to the development of sophisticated models to deal with bandwidth problems in mobile devices. Due to low bit-rate requirement of the current mobile communication, Mobile Visual Search became a very challenging problem. In this direction, this paper presents important conclusions based on a comprehensive evaluation of SIFT matching performance against various parameters (e.g. JPEG quality/compression in model and test images, image resolution, etc). The main conclusion of the performed experiments is that reducing JPEG quality from 100% to 30% slightly impart the matching performance, while it significantly reduces the communication bandwidth requirement by ≈ 70%.