Feature (computer vision)

In computer vision and , a feature is a piece of information about the content of an image; typically about whether a certain region of the image has certain properties. Features may be specific structures in the image such as points, edges or objects. Features may also be the result of a general neighborhood operation or feature detection applied to the image. Other examples of features are related to motion in image sequences, or to shapes defined in terms of curves or boundaries between different image regions. More broadly a feature is any piece of information which is relevant for solving the computational task related to a certain application. This is the same sense as feature in machine learning and pattern recognition generally, though image processing has a very sophisticated collection of features. The feature concept is very general and the choice of features in a particular computer vision system may be highly dependent on the specific problem at hand. There is no universal or exact definition of what constitutes a feature, and the exact definition often depends on the problem or the type of application. Nevertheless, a feature is typically defined as an "interesting" part of an , and features are used as a starting point for many computer vision algorithms. Since features are used as the starting point and main primitives for subsequent algorithms, the overall algorithm will often only be as good as its feature detector. Consequently, the desirable property for a feature detector is repeatability: whether or not the same feature will be detected in two or more different images of the same scene. Feature detection is a low-level operation. That is, it is usually performed as the first operation on an image, and examines every pixel to see if there is a feature present at that pixel. If this is part of a larger algorithm, then the algorithm will typically only examine the image in the region of the features.