Illumination robust interest point detection

Most interest point detection algorithms are highly sensitive to illumination variations. This paper presents a method to find interest points robustly even under large non-uniform photometric changes. The method, which we call illumination robust feature extraction transform (IRFET), determines salient interest points in an image by calculating and analyzing contrast signatures. A contrast signature shows the response of an interest point detector with respect to a set of contrast stretching functions. The IRFET is generic and can be used with most interest point detectors. In this paper, we demonstrate that the IRFET improves the repeatability rate of the Harris corner detector significantly (by around 25% on average in the experiments).