Performance and Trade-off Evaluation of SIFT, SURF, FAST, STAR and ORB feature detection algorithms in Visual Odometry

Abstract

In recent years there has been a great deal of research and study in the field of visual odometry, which has led to the development of practical processes such as visual based measurement in robotics and automotive technology. Direct methods, feature-based methods and hybrid methods are three common approaches in solving visual odometry problems and given the general belief that feature-based approach speeds are higher, this approach has been welcomed in recent years. Therefore, an attempt has been made in the present study to calculate the transformation matrix of two-dimensional sequential image sets using invariant features that can estimate the changes in camera rotation and translation. In the algorithm, two-steps of identifying keypoints and removing outliers are performed using five different local feature detection algorithms (SURF, SIFT, FAST, STAR, ORB) and RANdom SAmple Consensus algorithm (RANSAC), respectively. In addition, the impact of each of them, their intrinsic parameters and dynamic noise on the accuracy of the transformation matrix are evaluated and analyzed in terms of rotational MSE and computational runtime.