are relatively sparse. Although local decisions are made, the output from a feature detection step does not need to be a binary image. The result is often represented in terms of sets of (connected or unconnected) coordinates of the image points where features have been detected, sometimes with subpixel accuracy.

When feature extraction is done without local decision making, the result is often referred to as a feature image. Consequently, a feature image can be seen as an image in the sense that it is a function of the same spatial