SIFT is a scale and rotation invariant local feature detector and descriptor. It detects keypoints in images and assigns each keypoint a unique descriptor vector for matching. The SIFT algorithm involves constructing scale space, finding keypoints using difference of Gaussians, assigning orientations, and generating 128-dimensional descriptor vectors based on histograms of gradient orientations around each keypoint. SIFT features are highly distinctive and robust to changes in illumination, noise, occlusion and affine transformations, making it effective for tasks like image matching, object recognition and image stitching.
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