Key-point detection with multi-layer center-surround inhibition

We present a biologically inspired algorithm for key-point detection based on multi-layer and nonlinear center-surround inhibition. A Bag-of-Visual-Words framework is used to evaluate the performance of the detector on the Oxford III-T Pet Dataset for pet recognition. The results demonstrate an increased performance of our algorithm compared to the SIFT key-point detector. We further improve the recognition rate by separately training codebooks for the ON- and OFF-type key points. The results show that our key-point detection algorithms outperform the SIFT detector by having a lower recognition-error rate over a whole range of different key-point densities. Randomly selected key-points are also outperformed.