PPD: A Robust Low-computation Local Descriptor for Mobile Image Retrieval

This paper proposes an efficient and yet powerful local descriptor called phase-space partition based descriptor (PPD). This descriptor is designed for the mobile image matching and retrieval. PPD, which is inspired from SIFT, also encodes the salient aspects of the image gradient in the neighborhood around an interest point. However, without employing SIFT's smoothed gradient orientation histogram, we apply the region based gradient statistics in phase space to the construction of a feature representation, which allows to reduce much computation requirements. The feature matching experiments demonstrate that PPD achieves favorable performance close to that of SIFT and faster building and matching. We also present results showing that the use of PPD descriptors in a mobile image retrieval application results in a comparable performance to SIFT.