SIFTpack: A Compact Representation for Efficient SIFT Matching

Computing distances between large sets of SIFT descriptors is a basic step in numerous algorithms in computer vision. When the number of descriptors is large, as is often the case, computing these distances can be extremely time consuming. In this paper we propose the SIFTpack: a compact way of storing SIFT descriptors, which enables significantly faster calculations between sets of SIFTs than the current solutions. SIFTpack can be used to represent SIFTs densely extracted from a single image or sparsely from multiple different images. We show that the SIFTpack representation saves both storage space and run time, for both finding nearest neighbors and for computing all distances between all descriptors. The usefulness of SIFTpack is also demonstrated as an alternative implementation for K-means dictionaries of visual words.