Combining color and geometry for local image matching

This paper introduces a generic way to incorporate color information into local, SIFT-like descriptors, in view of image matching. First, a new color descriptor, relying on local hue histograms, is introduced. Second, we describe a procedure permitting the automatic setting of matching parameters when matching images using both geometric and color information. Experiments on a color image database show that our SIFT+Hue combination performs significantly better than classical color descriptors.