A fast radial symmetry transform for detecting points of interest

Abstract

A new feature detection technique is presented that utilises local radial symmetry to identify regions of interest within a scene. This transform is significantly faster than existing techniques using radial symmetry and offers the possibility of real-time implementation on a standard processor. The new transform is shown to perform well on a wide variety of images and its performance is tested against leading techniques from the literature. Both as a facial feature detector and as a generic region of interest detector the new transform is seen to offer equal or superior performance to contemporary techniques whilst requiring drastically less computational effort.