Abstract
Feature detection, description and matching are essential components of various computer vision applications, thus they have received a considerable attention in the last decades. Several feature detectors and descriptors have been proposed in the literature with a variety of definitions forwhat kind of points in an image is potentially interesting (i. e., a distinctive attribute). This chapter introduces basic notation and mathematical concepts for detecting and describing image features. Then, it discusses properties of perfect features and gives an overview of various existing detection and description methods. Furthermore, it explains some approaches to feature matching. Finally, the chapter discusses the most used techniques for performance evaluation of detection and description algorithms.