Europole Mer : research consortium on marine science and technology in Brittany

In this work, we propose a new invariant descriptor for sonar texture based on the
characterization of the spatial patterns of image keypoints. Our proposed descriptor initially relies on the
construction of a set of codebook of SIFT keypoints from their descriptor vectors. Accordingly, ours
descriptor fully inherits the invariance properties of the SIFT descriptors, i.e. invariance to contrast
change and affine transformations. An application to sonar texture classification is considered.