GPU-ASIFT: A fast fully affine-invariant feature extraction algorithm

This paper presents a method that takes advantage of powerful graphics hardware to obtain fully affine-invariant image feature detection and matching. The chosen approach is the accurate, but also very computationally expensive, ASIFT algorithm. We have created a CUDA version of this algorithm that is up to 70 times faster than the original implementation, while keeping the algorithm´s accuracy close to that of ASIFT. It´s matching performance is therefore much better than that of other non-fully affine-invariant algorithms. Also, this approach was adapted to fit the multi-GPU paradigm in order to assess the acceleration potential from modern GPU clusters.