Abstract:

This paper presents a biologically inspired local image descriptor that combines color and shape features. Compared with previous descriptors, red-cyan cells associated with L, M, and S cones (L for long, M for medium, and S for short) are used to indicate one of the opponent color channels. Stepping forward from state-of-the-art color feature extraction, we exploit a new approach to compute the color orientation and magnitudes of three opponent color channels, namely, red-green, blue-yellow, and red-cyan, in two-dimensional space. Color orientation is calculated in histograms with magnitude weighting. We linearly concatenate the four-color-opponent-channel histogram and scale-invariant-feature-transform histogram in the final step. We apply our biologically inspired descriptor to describe the local image feature. Quantitative comparisons with state-of-the-art descriptors demonstrate the significant advantages of maintaining invariance to photometric and geometric changes in image matching, particularly in cases, such as illumination variation and image blurring, where more color contrast information is observed.

Key words: local image descriptor, color, opponent color, scale-invariant feature transform, image matching