Absence Importance and Its Application to Feature Detection and Matching

Feature detection and matching play important roles in many fields of computer vision, such as image understanding, feature recognition, 3D-reconstruction, video analysis, etc. Extracting features is usually the first step for feature detection or matching, and the gradient feature is one of the most used selections. In this paper, a new image feature-absence importance (AI) feature, which can directly characterize the local structure information, is proposed. Greatly different from the most existing features, the proposed absence importance feature is mainly based on the consideration that the absence of the important pixel will have a great effect on the local structure. Two absence importance features, mean absence importance (MAI) and standard deviation absence importance (SDAI), are defined and used subsequently to construct new algorithms for feature detection and matching. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed absence importance features can be used as an important complement of the gradient feature and applied successfully to the fields of feature detection and matching.