Multiresolution feature detection using a family of isotropic bandpass filters

Presents a novel method which uses a special type of multi-scale isotropic band-pass filters to detect image landmark and corner features. This paper mainly contributes to the solutions of the following problems: (1) defining a general family of feature detectors under a unified framework that are able to enhance and detect the desired features; (2) explaining theoretically and experimentally why these feature points can be detected by the proposed detectors; and (3) extending the detectors to multi-scale versions for jointly achieving good detectability and localization where an automatic scale selection method is applied. The paper then presents several applications for detecting landmarks and corners using the proposed methods, in order to illustrate their usage. These include detecting landmarks from gesture images (of the face and hand), from airborne and vehicle-borne IR landmine images, and from images containing object corners. Experiments have been performed using the proposed detectors to these applications. Some comparisons and evaluations have also been performed. The results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed detectors in terms of feature detectability and localization.