Disclosed embodiments facilitate keypoint selection in part by assigning a similarity score to each candidate keypoint being considered for selection. The similarity score may be based on the maximum measured similarity of an image patch associated with a keypoint in relation to an image patch in a local image section in a region around the image patch. A subset of the candidate keypoints with the lowest similarity scores may be selected and used to detect and/or track objects in subsequent images and/or to determine camera pose.