In this post I will explain how to add a simple rotation invariance mechanism to the BRIEF[1] descriptor, I will present evaluation results showing the rotation invariant BRIEF significantly outperforms regular BRIEF where visual geometric changes are present and finally I will post a C++ implementation integrated into OpenCV3.

Just as a reminder, we had a general post on local image descriptors, an introductory post to binary descriptors and a post presenting the BRIEF descriptor. We also had posts on other binary descriptors:  ORB[2], BRISK[3] and FREAK[4].

We’ll start by a visual example, displaying the correct matches between a pair of images of the same scene, taken from different angles – once with the original version of BRIEF (first image pair) and one with the proposed rotation invariant version of BRIEF (second image pair):

Correct matches when using the BRIEF descriptor

Correct matches when using the rotation invariant BRIEF descriptor

It can be seen that there are much more correct matches when using the proposed rotation invariant of the BRIEF descriptor.

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