Quantitative review of local descriptors for visual search

Local Visual detectors and descriptors have been studied for many years, but their applications, for example on visual search, for large volume, low cost, embedded systems have been limited or negligible to date. One reason is the lack of an industry standard applicable at worldwide level. MPEG Compact Descriptors for Visual Search (CDVS) working group is filling the gap by defining a highly performing extraction stage and the bitstream syntax at its output. As a contribution to such process, this work reviews existing methods for interest point detection and description. They are compared on several databases, exploiting the pairwise matching test environment devised by the MPEG CDVS standardization group.