This repository is a wrapper for well-known feature extractor, ORB, to make it use of 16-bit image.
Unlike normal RGB 8-bit image, TIR (Thermal-Infrared) image contains 14-bit information.
It has been a practice to convert (normalize) TIR image into 8-bit, and then apply traditional 8-bit feature extractor to it.
But we argue that it can be better to detect and describe features from raw 14-bit image.
Advantages of using raw 14-bit image is ...

1. preserve raw intensity information
2. make image irrelevent to the normalization method
3. detect more features

We provide ready-to-use C and Python interface. Most of the code is from official OpenCV, and we slightly changed the part of them.

Clone and build the repository.

git clone https://github.com/HyeonJaeGil/ORB16.git && cd ORB16
git submodule update --init --recursive

# build
mkdir build && cd build && cmake .. && make

# test
./test_ORB16

# build
pip install -e . 

# test
python python/test_pyorb.py