Evaluation of Interest Point Detectors in Presence of Noise

Detection of repeatable keypoints is often one of the first steps leading to obtain a solution able to recognise objects on images. Such objects are characterised by content of image patches indicated by keypoints. A given image patch is worth being described and processed in further steps, if the interest point inside of it can be found despite different image transformations or distortions. Therefore, it is important to compare keypoint detection techniques using image datasets that contain transformed or noisy images. Since most of detector evaluations rely on small datasets or are focused on a specific application of compared techniques, in this paper two large datasets which cover typical transformations, as well as challenging distortions that can occur while image processing, are used. The first dataset contains 200,000 transformed images, and it has been prepared for the purpose of this study. The second dataset, TID2013, is widely used for perceptual image quality assessment; it contains 3,000 images with 24 distortions. Finally, interest point detectors are evaluated on four datasets, and repeatability score and time of detection are used as measures of their performance.