SORB: improve ORB feature matching by semantic segmentation

Feature matching is at the base of many computer vision algorithms such as SLAM, which is a technology widely used in the area from intelligent vehicles (IV) to assistance for the visually impaired (VI). This article presents an improved detector and a novel semantic-visual descriptor, coined SORB (Semantic ORB), combining binary semantic labels and traditional ORB descriptor. Compared to the original ORB feature, the new SORB performs better in uniformity of distribution and accuracy of matching. We demonstrate it through experiments on some open source datasets and several real-world images obtained by RealSense.