Many computer vision tasks rely on feature extraction. Inter est points are such features. This paper shows that interest points are geometrically stable under different transformations and have high information content (distinctiveness). These two properties make interest points very successful in the context of image matching. To measure these two properties quantitatively, we introduce two evaluation criteria: repeatability rate and information content.

The quality of the interest points depends on the detector used. In this paper several detectors are compared according to the criteria specified above. We determine which detector gives the best results and show that it satisfies the criteria well.