I was looking to extract SURF features (or something similar) in an application that gets new images at 25 FPS. I thought feature extracting would be possible at least close to real time. I tried OpenSURF with the same parameters that are supplied by the demo file, and was quite devastated to see that at a resolution of 640×480 my 2 GHz Core2 Duo takes 5 to 8 seconds for a single image.
1) Is that normal?
2) Can I adjust parameters to get worse results but faster execution time?
3) I actually do not require scale / rotation invariance, just good features to track between frames (the camera is in a fixed position) / between different lighting conditions. Is there a viable alternative that might run (near) real time?
1) Yes it is normal SURF is poor on performance 🙁
2) You should use other descriptor and detector, as I tested the Orb is one of the best and fastest, but in my opinion if You want to have the fastets result use FAST and BRIEF it does not have rotation invariance but it is extremly fast in compare with SURF 🙂
try this I hope you will be sattisfied and read this