Automatic Thresholding of SIFT Descriptors

We introduce a method to perform automatic thresholding of SIFT descriptors that improves matching performance by at least 15.9% on the Oxford image matching benchmark. The method uses a contrario methodology to determine a unique bin magnitude threshold. This is done by building a generative uniform background model for descriptors and determining when bin magnitudes have reached a sufficient level. The presented method, called meaningful clamping, contrasts from the current SIFT implementation by efficiently computing a clamping threshold that is unique for every descriptor.