  In this paper, we propose a novel benchmark for evaluating local image
descriptors. We demonstrate that the existing datasets and evaluation protocols
do not specify unambiguously all aspects of evaluation, leading to ambiguities
and inconsistencies in results reported in the literature. Furthermore, these
datasets are nearly saturated due to the recent improvements in local
descriptors obtained by learning them from large annotated datasets. Therefore,
we introduce a new large dataset suitable for training and testing modern
descriptors, together with strictly defined evaluation protocols in several
tasks such as matching, retrieval and classification. This allows for more
realistic, and thus more reliable comparisons in different application
scenarios. We evaluate the performance of several state-of-the-art descriptors
and analyse their properties. We show that a simple normalisation of
traditional hand-crafted descriptors can boost their performance to the level
of deep learning based descriptors within a realistic benchmarks evaluation.
