A short feature vector for image matching: The Log-Polar Magnitude feature descriptor.

The choice of an optimal feature detector-descriptor combination for image matching often depends on the application and the image type. In this paper, we propose the Log-Polar Magnitude feature descriptor-a rotation, scale, and illumination invariant descriptor that achieves comparable performance to SIFT on a large variety of image registration problems but with much shorter feature vectors. The descriptor is based on the Log-Polar Transform followed by a Fourier Transform and selection of the magnitude spectrum components.