Accumulated Stability Voting: A Robust Descriptor from Descriptors of Multiple Scales

This paper proposes a novel local descriptor through accumulated stability voting (ASV). The stability of feature dimensions is measured by their differences across scales. To be more robust to noise, the stability is further quantized by thresholding. The principle of maximum entropy is utilized for determining the best thresholds for maximizing discriminant power of the resultant descriptor. Accumulating stability renders a real-valued descriptor and it can be converted into a binary descriptor by an additional thresholding process. The real-valued descriptor attains high matching accuracy while the binary descriptor makes a good compromise between storage and accuracy. Our descriptors are simple yet effective, and easy to implement. In addition, our descriptors require no training. Experiments on popular benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our descriptors and their superiority to the state-of-the-art descriptors.