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Your question seems to be a little bit fuzzy, since at each computer vision conference you will find at least one new local feature descriptor. Here some from the last ICCV (2013):

• "BOLD Features to Detect Texture-less Objects" http://vision.deis.unibo.it/BOLD/
• "SYM-FISH: A Symmetry-Aware Flip Invariant Sketch Histogram Shape Descriptor" http://cs.tju.edu.cn/orgs/vision/~xguo/publication/FISH.pdf
• "Nested Shape Descriptors" https://github.com/jebyrne/seedoflife
• "An Adaptive Descriptor Design for ObjectRecognition in the Wild" http://ece.ubc.ca/~zhenyug/iccv_2013_camReady.pdf

So maybe you should constrain your question somehow (I don't know how, maybe number of citations). One feature which raised some attention is probably KAZE and its binary version AKAZE, s. www.robesafe.com/personal/pablo.alcantarilla/kaze.html (<-- seems to be down atm), if you search via github, you'll also find some attempts to integrate it in OpenCV.