A Low Complexity, Descriptor-Less SIFT Feature Tracking System

Features which exhibit scale and rotation invariance, such as SIFT, are notorious for expensive computation time, and often overlooked for real-time tracking scenarios. This paper proposes a descriptorless matching algorithm based on motion vectors between consecutive frames to find the geometrically closest candidate to each tracked reference feature in the database. Descriptor-less matching forgoes expensive SIFT descriptor extraction without loss of matching accuracy and exhibits dramatic speed-up compared to traditional, naive matching based trackers. Descriptor-less SIFT tracking runs in real-time on an Intel dual core machine at an average of 24 frames per second.