Let's conclude this chapter with a real-life (or perhaps fantasy-life) example. Imagine you are working for the Gotham forensics department and you need to identify a tattoo. You have the original picture of a criminal's tattoo (perhaps captured in CCTV footage), but you don't know the identity of the person. However, you possess a database of tattoos, indexed with the name of the person that the tattoo belongs to.
Let's divide this task into two parts:
- Build a database by saving image descriptors to files
- Load the database and scan for matches between a query image's descriptors and the descriptors in the database
We will cover these tasks in the next two subsections.