The pro and con of BRIEF and ORB compared to SIFT

15
votes

I am doing some research in Local Feature representation, so SIFT, SURF and such.

Now, has anybody here ever tried BRIEF and ORB? If so, can you discuss what are some of the pro and con with respective to SIFT?

2
computer-visionsiftfeature-detection

2 Answers

14
votes

here is one comparison I have found helpful. Essentially BRIEF and ORB are much faster. There is not a good comparison of scale invariance there but personally I have found SURF/SIFT to be more scale invariant than BRIEF and ORB. I recommend if you are going to use these for a specific use case you try both to see which meets your needs best.

5
votes

SURF/SIFT uses patents which need to be payed somehow. I'm not up to date on this but the costs can be significant. So i would go with ORB if possible - except of course if you don't care about money :)

SIFT: The algorithm is patented in the US; the owner is the University of British Columbia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transform)

SURF: An application of the algorithm is patented in the US. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SURF)