ASIFT: An Algorithm for Fully Affine Invariant Comparison

If a physical object has a smooth or piecewise smooth boundary, its images obtained by cameras in varying positions undergo smooth apparent deformations. These deformations are locally well approximated by affine transforms of the image plane. In consequence the solid object recognition problem has often been led back to the computation of affine invariant image local features. The similarity invariance (invariance to translation, rotation, and zoom) is dealt with rigorously by the SIFT method The method illustrated and demonstrated in this work, Affine-SIFT (ASIFT), simulates a set of sample views of the initial images, obtainable by varying the two camera axis orientation parameters, namely the latitude and the longitude angles, which are not treated by the SIFT method. Then it applies the SIFT method itself to all images thus generated. Thus, ASIFT covers effectively all six parameters of the affine transform.