A Comparative Study on Contour-Based Corner Detectors

Contour-based corner detectors directly or indirectly estimate a significance measure (e.g. curvature) on the points of a planar curve and select the curvature extrema points as corners. While an extensive number of contour-based corner detectors have been proposed over the last four decades, there is no comparative study of recently proposed promising detectors. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap. We present the general frame-work of the contour-based corner detection technique and discuss two major issues – curve smoothing and curvature estimation, which have major impacts on the corner detection performance. A number of promising detectors are compared using an automatic evaluation system on a common large dataset. It is observed that while the detectors using indirect curvature estimation techniques are more robust, the detectors using direct curvature estimation techniques are faster.