  Since local feature detection has been one of the most active research areas
in computer vision, a large number of detectors have been proposed. This has
rendered the task of characterizing the performance of various feature
detection methods an important issue in vision research. Inspired by the good
practices of electronic system design, a generic framework based on the
improved repeatability measure is presented in this paper that allows
assessment of the upper and lower bounds of detector performance in an effort
to design more reliable and effective vision systems. This framework is then
employed to establish operating and guarantee regions for several state-of-the
art detectors for JPEG compression and uniform light changes. The results are
obtained using a newly acquired, large image database (15092 images) with 539
different scenes. These results provide new insights into the behavior of
detectors and are also useful from the vision systems design perspective.
