Does openCV SurfFeatureDetector unnecessarily extract descriptors internally? - c++

Question

I just wondered, if using a SurfFeatureDetector to detect keypoints and a SurfDescriptorExtractor to extract the SURF descriptors (see code below as described here) wouldn't extract the descriptors twice.
SurfFeatureDetector detector( minHessian );
std::vector<KeyPoint> keypoints;
detector.detect( img, keypoints ); //detecting keypoints, extracting descriptors without returning them
SurfDescriptorExtractor extractor;
Mat descriptors;
extractor.compute( img, keypoints, descriptors ); // extracting descriptors a second time
The openCV documentation says, those 2 classes are wrappers for the SURF() class.
The SURF::operator() is overloaded, one version taking just a keypoint vector, the other one additionally taking a vector for the descriptors.
What intrigues me... both then call the cvExtractSURF() function, which seems to extract the descriptors, no matter what... (I did not dive too deep into the C code as I find it hard to understand, so maybe I'm wrong)
But this would mean that the SurfFeatureDetector would extract descriptors without returning them. Using the SurfDescriptorExtractor in the next step just does it a second time, which seems very inefficient to me. But am I right?

Answer 1

You can be assured that detector does not actually compute the descriptors. The key statement to look at is line 687 of surf.cpp if( !descriptors ) continue; Features are not computed during detection, the way it should be. This kind of architecture is most likely due to the fact that surf code was "added" to OpenCV after it was designed/developed to work by itself.
As a background: note that detector and feature extractors are different things. You first "detect" points using SurfFeatureDetector where local features are extracted (using SurfDescriptorExtractor). The snippet you have is a good guide.