BIPCO: ultrasound feature points based on phase congruency detector and binary pattern descriptor

Detection of feature points in medical ultrasound (US) images is the starting point of many clinical tasks, such as segmentation of lesions in pathological areas, estimation of organ deformation, and multimodality image fusion. However, obtaining a reliable feature point localization is a complex task even for an expert radiologist due to the US image characteristics: strong presence of noise, insidious artifacts, and low contrast. In this work, we describe a feature detector based on phase congruency (PhC) combined with a binary pattern descriptor.