SPHORB: A Fast and Robust Binary Feature on the Sphere

In this paper, we propose SPHORB, a new fast and robust binary feature detector and descriptor for spherical panoramic images. In contrast to state-of-the-art spherical features, our approach stems from the geodesic grid, a nearly equal-area hexagonal grid parametrization of the sphere used in climate modeling. It enables us to directly build fine-grained pyramids and construct robust features on the hexagonal spherical grid, thus avoiding the costly computation of spherical harmonics and their associated bandwidth limitation. We further study how to achieve scale and rotation invariance for the proposed SPHORB feature. Extensive experiments show that SPHORB consistently outperforms other existing spherical features in accuracy, efficiency and robustness to camera movements. The superior performance of SPHORB has also been validated by real-world matching tests.