Interest point detection through multiobjective genetic programming

The detection of stable and informative image points is one of the most important low-level problems in modern computer vision. This paper proposes a multiobjective genetic programming (MO-GP) approach for the automatic synthesis of operators that detect interest points. The proposal is unique for interest point detection because it poses a MO formulation of the point detection problem. The search objectives for the MO-GP search consider three properties that are widely expressed as desirable for an interest point detector, these are: (1) stability; (2) point dispersion; and (3) high information content. The results suggest that the point detection task is a MO problem, and that different operators can provide different trade-offs among the objectives. In fact, MO-GP is able to find several sets of Pareto optimal operators, whose performance is validated on standardized procedures including an extensive test with 500 images; as a result, we could say that all solutions found by the system dominate previously man-made detectors in the Pareto sense. In conclusion, the MO formulation of the interest point detection problem provides the appropriate framework for the automatic design of image operators that achieve interesting trade-offs between relevant performance criteria that are meaningful for a variety of vision tasks.

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► Multi-objective genetic programming is applied to the problem of interest point detection.
► Evolved estimators are Pareto optimal solutions when compared to state-of-the-art methods.
► Results are validated on a large set of real-world images.