SIFT extracts more key features from the image. At 70 * 70, the average SIFT face photo extracts nearly 40-50 functions, however, SURF extracts almost 8-10. SURF is faster than SIFT, but their benefits vary depending on the application you want to make. For example, when recognizing faces, some of the useful features may be skipped in SURF, so in my tests I saw that SIFT is more useful and accurate in applications such as face recognition, because it extracts more features.
source share