Key points generated in the previous step produce a lot of key points. Some of them lie along an edge, or they don’t have enough contrast. In both cases, they are not useful as features. So we get rid of them. The approach is similar to the one used in the Harris Corner Detector for removing edge features. For low contrast features, we simply check their intensities.
Removing low contrast features
This is simple. If the magnitude of the intensity (i.e., without sign) at the current pixel in the DoG image (that is being checked for minima/maxima) is less than a certain value, it is rejected.
Because we have subpixel keypoints (we used the Taylor expansion to refine keypoints), we again need to use the taylor expansion to get the intensity value at subpixel locations. If it’s magnitude is less than a certain value, we reject the keypoint.
Removing edges
The idea is