Visual Detection of Business Cards: Study of Interest Key-point Detectors

This study examines the use of interest key-point detector for the application of detecting and recognizing business cards that are slowly waved in front of the camera. We focus on two interest point detectors Scale Invariant Feature Transform and Maximally Stable Extremal Regions. Both are presented in detail with main emphasis on SIFT detector. Characteristics of both are examined with respect to the detection of business cards and SIFT is selected as suitable detector for this problem. A stability of SIFT key-points is also experimentally evaluated on a newly created database of business cards for this purpose.