Detection and description of image features: An introduction

Detection and description of image features play a vital role in various application domains such as image processing, computer vision, pattern recognition, and machine learning. There are two type of features that can be extracted from an image content; namely global and local features. Global features describe the image as a whole and can be interpreted as a particular property of the image involving all pixels; while, the local features aim to detect keypoints within the image and describe regions around these keypoints. After extracting the features and their descriptors from images, matching of common structures between images (i.e., features matching) is the next step for these applications. This chapter presents a general and brief introduction to topics of feature extraction for a variety of application domains. Its main aim is to provide short descriptions of the chapters included in this book volume.