A local image descriptor robust to illumination changes

Abstract

In this paper we address the problem of building a local image descriptor that is insensitive to the complex appearance changes induced by illumination variations on non-flat objects. The presented descriptor is based on multi-scale and multi-oriented even Gabor filters and constructed in such a way that typical effects of illumination variations like changes of edge polarity or spatially varying brightness changes are taken into account for illumination insensitivity. For evaluation, a dataset of textured as well as textureless objects is used which introduces a greater challenge towards evaluating the robustness against illumination changes than conventional datasets used in the past. The experiments finally show the superiority of our descriptor compared to existing ones under illumination changes. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.