A generalised feature for low level vision

This papers presents a novel quantised transform (the SinclairTown or ST transform for short) that subsumes the rolls of both edgedetector, MSER style region detector and corner detector. The transform is similar to the unsharp transform but the difference from the local mean is quantised to 3 values (dark-neutral-light). The transform naturally leads to the definition of an appropriate local scale. A range of methods for extracting shape features form the transformed image are presented. The generalised feature provides a robust basis for establishing correspondence between images. The transform readily admits more complicated kernel behaviour including multi-scale and asymmetric elements to prefer shorter scale or oriented local features.