We present a scheme for measuring completeness of local feature extraction in terms of image coding. Completeness is here considered as good coverage of relevant image information by the features. As each feature requires a certain number of bits which are representative for a certain subregion of the image, we interpret the coverage as a sparse coding scheme. The measure is therefore based on a comparison of two densities over the image domain: An entropy density pH(x) based on local image statistics, and a feature coding density pc(x) which is directly computed from each particular set of local features. Motivated by the coding scheme in JPEG, the entropy distribution is derived from the power spectrum of local patches around each pixel position in a statistically sound manner. As the total number of bits for coding the image and for representing it with local features may be different, we measure incompleteness by the Hellinger distance between pH(x) and pc(x). We will derive a procedure for measuring incompleteness of possibly mixed sets of local features and show results on standard datasets using some of the most popular region and keypoint detectors, including Lowe, MSER and the recently published SFOP detectors. Furthermore, we will draw some interesting conclusions about the complementarity of detectors.

This paper presents a novel method for detecting scale invariant keypoints. It fills a gap in the set of available methods, as it proposes a scale-selection mechanism for junction-type features. The method is a scale-space extension of the detector proposed by Förstner (1994) and uses the general spiral feature model of Bigün (1990) to unify different types of features within the same framework. By locally optimising the consistency of image regions with respect to the spiral model, we are able to detect and classify image structures with complementary properties over scale-space, especially star and circular shapes as interpretable and identifiable subclasses. Our motivation comes from calibrating images of structured scenes with poor texture, where blob detectors alone cannot find sufficiently many keypoints, while existing corner detectors fail due to the lack of scale invariance. The procedure can be controlled by semantically clear parameters. One obtains a set of keypoints with position, scale, type and consistency measure. We characterise the detector and show results on common benchmarks. It competes in repeatability with the Lowe detector, but finds more stable keypoints in poorly textured areas, and shows comparable or higher accuracy than other recent detectors. This makes it useful for both object recognition and camera calibration.