Modified SIFT descriptor for image matching under interference

There remain many difficult problems in computer vision research such as object recognition, three dimensional reconstruction, object tracking, etc. And the basis of solving these problems relies on image matching. The Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) [5] algorithm has been widely used for image matching application. The SIFT algorithm can successfully extract the most descriptive feature points in given input images taken under different viewpoints. However, the performance of the original SIFT algorithm degrades under the influence of noise. We propose to modify the SIFT algorithm to produce better invariant feature points for image matching under noise. We also propose to employ the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) as the measurement of similarity between two descriptors. We present extensive experiment results to demonstrate the performance of the proposed methods in image matching under noise.