MORB: A Multi-Scale Binary Descriptor

Local image features play an important role in matching images under different geometric and photometric transformations. However, as the scale difference across views increases, the matching performance may considerably decrease. To address this problem we propose MORB, a multi-scale binary descriptor that is based on ORB and that improves the accuracy of feature matching under scale changes. MORB describes an image patch at different scales using an oriented sampling pattern of intensity comparisons in a predefined set of pixel pairs. We also propose a matching strategy that estimates the cross-scale match between MORB descriptors across views. Experiments show that MORB outperforms state-of-the-art binary descriptors under several transformations.