Performance Evaluation of Feature Detection for Local Optical Flow Tracking

Due to its high computational efficiency the Kanade Lucas Tomasi feature tracker is still widely accepted and a utilized method to compute sparse motion fields or trajectories in video sequences. This method is made up of a Good Feature To Track feature detection and a pyramidal Lucas Kanade feature tracking algorithm. It is well known that the Good Feature To Track takes into account the Aperture Problem, but it does not consider the Generalized Aperture Problem. In this paper we want to provide an evaluation of a set of alternative feature detection methods. These methods are taken from feature matching techniques like FAST, SIFT and MSER. The evaluation is based on the Middlebury dataset and performed by using an improved pyramidal Lucas Kanade method, called RLOF feature tracker. To compare the results of the feature detector and RLOF pair, we propose a methodology based on accuracy, efficiency and covering measurements.