MDGHM-SURF: A robust local image descriptor based on modified discrete Gaussian–Hermite moment

• We propose a novel family of the SURF descriptor.
• To solve the sensitivity of the SURF, we redefine the SURF using MDGHM (MDGHM-SURF).
• The MDGHM offers more feature information than the first-order derivative-based SURF.
• The evaluations are conducted with six types of deformations and panoramic image generation.
• The results indicate that our method outperforms other SURF related algorithms.

This paper proposes a novel family of local feature descriptors, a variant of the speed up robust features (SURF) descriptor, which is capable of demonstrably better performance. The conventional SURF descriptor is an efficient implementation of the SIFT descriptor. Although the SURF descriptor can represent the nature of the underlying image pattern, it is still sensitive to more complicated deformations such as large viewpoint and rotation changes. To solve this problem, our family of descriptors, called MDGHM-SURF, is based on the modified discrete Gaussian–Hermite moment (MDGHM), which devises a movable mask to represent the local feature information of non-square images. Whereas conventional SURF uses first-order derivatives, MDGHM-SURF uses MDGHM, which offers more feature information than first-order derivative-based local descriptors such as SURF and SIFT. Consequently, by redefining the conventional SURF descriptor using MDGHM, MDGHM-SURF can extract more distinctive features than conventional SURF. The results of evaluations conducted with six types of deformations indicate that our proposed method outperforms the matching accuracy of other SURF related algorithms.