Emerging Topics in Computer Vision

8.3. Image Features

Before discussing image features, it is important to keep in mind that content-based retrieval does not depend on a complete description of the pictorial content of the image. It is sufficient that a retrieval system presents similar images (i.e., similar in some user-defined sense). The description of the content by image features should serve that goal primarily.

One such goal can be met by using invariance as a tool to deal with the accidental distortions in the image content introduced by the sensory gap. From Section 8.2.2, it is clear that invariant features may carry more object-specific information than other features, as they are insensitive to the accidental imaging conditions such as illumination, object pose, and ...