Fast Matching of Binary Features

There has been growing interest in the use of binary-valued features, such as BRIEF, ORB, and BRISK for efficient local feature matching. These binary features have several advantages over vector-based features as they can be faster to compute, more compact to store, and more efficient to compare. Although it is fast to compute the Hamming distance between pairs of binary features, particularly on modern architectures, it can still be too slow to use linear search in the case of large datasets. For vector-based features, such as SIFT and SURF, the solution has been to use approximate nearest-neighbor search, but these existing algorithms are not suitable for binary features. In this paper we introduce a new algorithm for approximate matching of binary features, based on priority search of multiple hierarchical clustering trees. We compare this to existing alternatives, and show that it performs well for large datasets, both in terms of speed and memory efficiency.