Dynamic optimization of hessian determinant image pyramid for memory‐efficient and high performance keypoint detection in SURF

With increasing demand for scale‐invariant and fast object recognition, speeded up robust features (SURF) have emerged and become a widely used feature extraction algorithm in computer vision. Nevertheless, SURF still requires high memory usage and heavy computations caused by the keypoint detection procedure that produces huge image pyramid composed of many hessian determinant (HD) data for supporting the scale‐invariance. Therefore, in this paper, dynamic optimization schemes of the HD image pyramid are proposed for completely removing the redundancies of the keypoint detection with keeping the original functionality of SURF without any loss. The proposed approach has shown to reduce memory usage by 45–51%, the execution time by 37–50% and the power consumption by 18–42% when compared with the keypoint detection in the original SURF algorithm.