image matching algorithms

[Daniel Fetchinson]

> > There are a number of free tools for image matching but it's not very
> > easy to decipher the actual algorithm from the code that includes db
> > management, GUI, etc, etc. I have my own image database and GUI so all
> > I need is the actual algorithm preferably in pseudo code and not in
> > the form of a research paper (from which I also found a lot but since
> > I'm not that much interested in the actual science of image
> > recognition this seems like an over kill).
>
> I'd recommend SIFT. There's quite a bit of information on SIFT. In most
> cases, they don't cover the background science too much, but are still
> heavy on the math. Pseudo code is hard to come by since it will take
> many lines of pseudo code just to express one concise mathematical
> equation. There are however many links to implementations in various
> languages on the Wikipedia page.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transform
>
> I have had good experiences with SIFT for feature extraction from images
> (I have used it for panorama stitching and robot mapping). It's
> insensitive to scale and rotation. Note that it is a patented algorithm
> and this may (or may not) pose a problem for you.

Thanks for the info! SIFT really looks like a heavy weight solution,
but do you think the whole  concept can be simplified if all I needed
was: given a photo, find similar ones? I mean SIFT first detects
objects on the image and find similarities, but I don't need the
detection part at all, all I care about is similarity for the whole
photo. I surely don't understand the big picture fully but just have
the general feeling that SIFT and other expert tools are an overkill
for me and a simplified version would be just as good with a much more
easily comprehensible core algorithm.

Or am I being too optimistic and there is no way out of going into the details?