Robust Keypoint Detection Using Higher-Order Scale Space Derivatives: Application to Image Retrieval

Image retrieval has been extensively studied over the last two decades due to the increasing demands for the effective use of multimedia data. Among various approaches to image retrieval, scale space representation and local keypoint descriptors have been shown to be a promising approach. Even though the concept of scale space representation has been known for a long time, it has now gained prominence as a powerful method for image retrieval mostly due to the invention of the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT). We will review the characteristics of the scale space operation and provide an extended method of scale space operation that significantly improves the image matching accuracy in the context of image retrieval. We use an operational tattoo image database containing 1,000 near duplicate images to show the superior retrieval performance of the proposed method compared to SIFT keypoints.