An Experimental Study of Keypoint Descriptor Fusion

Local feature descriptors play a crucial role in computer vision problems, especially robot motion. Existing descriptors are highly accurate, but their performance de-pends on the influence of distracting factors, such as illumi-nation and viewpoint. There is room for further improvement of these descriptors. In this paper, we provide an in-depth analysis of several exciting features of the descriptor fusion model (DFM) we have proposed in our recent work, which uses an autoencoder to combine descriptors and exploit their respective advantages. With this DFM framework, we fur-ther validate that fused descriptors can retain advantageous properties and that our DFM is a generally applicable method with respect to various component descriptors. Specifically, we evaluate multiple combinations of hand-crafted and CNN descriptors concerning their performance on a benchmark dataset with illumination and viewpoint changes to obtain comprehensive experimental results. The results show that the fused descriptors have better matching accuracy than their component descriptors.