When using georeferenced drone images and SIFT feature extraction, I can set the minimum number of features, and if the number is not reached a 2nd or even a 3rd pass at lower thresholds will take place, until the min number of features is reached or exceeded.
This does not appear to be the case with HAHOG, which it defaults to with non-georeferenced images from phone or DSLR, and it appears that no second passes are made if the min num features is not reached.