The pro and con of BRIEF and ORB compared to SIFT

here is one comparison I have found helpful. Essentially BRIEF and ORB are much faster. There is not a good comparison of scale invariance there but personally I have found SURF/SIFT to be more scale invariant than BRIEF and ORB. I recommend if you are going to use these for a specific use case you try both to see which meets your needs best.

SURF/SIFT uses patents which need to be payed somehow. I'm not up to date on this but the costs can be significant. So i would go with ORB if possible - except of course if you don't care about money :)

SIFT: The algorithm is patented in the US; the owner is the University of British Columbia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transform)

SURF: An application of the algorithm is patented in the US. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SURF)