Low complexity image matching using color based SIFT

Image matching and search is gaining significant commercial importance nowadays due to various applications it enables such as augmented reality, image-queries for internet search, etc. Many researchers have effectively used color information in an image to improve its matching accuracy. These techniques, however, cannot be directly used for large scale mobile visual search applications that pose strict constraints on the size of the extracted features, computational resources and the system accuracy. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new and effective technique to incorporate color information that can use the SIFT extraction technique. We conduct our experiments on a large dataset containing around 33, 000 images that is currently being investigated in the MPEG-Compact Descriptors for Visual Search Standard and show substantial improvement compared to baseline.