Hessian Affine Region Detector - Robustness To Affine and Other Transformations

Robustness To Affine and Other Transformations

Mikolajczyk et al. (2005) have done a thorough analysis of several state of the art affine region detectors: Harris affine, Hessian affine, MSER, IBR & EBR and salient detectors. Mikolajczyk et al. analyzed both structured images and textured images in their evaluation. Linux binaries of the detectors and their test images are freely available at their webpage. A brief summary of the results of Mikolajczyk et al. (2005) follow; see A comparison of affine region detectors for a more quantitative analysis.

Overall, the Hessian affine detector performs second best to MSER. Like the Harris affine detector, Hessian affine interest regions tend to be more numerous and smaller than other detectors. For a single image, the Hessian affine detector typically identifies more reliable regions than the Harris-Affine detector. The performance changes depending on the type of scene being analyzed. The Hessian affine detector responds well to textured scenes in which there are a lot of corner-like parts. However, for some structured scenes, like buildings, the Hessian affine detector performs very well. This is complementary to MSER that tends to do better with well structured (segmentable) scenes.