SEM: Structured Epipolar Matcher for Local Feature Matching

CVPR 2023 Image Matching Workshop


Jiahao Chang*, Jiahuan Yu*, Tianzhu Zhang

University of Science and Technology of China
* denotes equal contribution

Thanks to LoFTR for their great work and well-organized code.
Also see our another work ASTR in local feature matching, accepted by CVPR 2023

Abstract


TL;DR: SEM leverages geometry priors (epipolar constraint) to filtering out irrelevant areas in attention and matching, and fuses relative positional information with anchor points to improve the robustness in textureless and repetitive texture areas.


Local feature matching is challenging due to textureless and repetitive patterns. Existing methods focus on using appearance features and global interaction and matching, while the importance of geometry priors in local feature matching has not been fully exploited. Different from these methods, in this paper, we delve into the importance of geometry prior and propose Structured Epipolar Matcher (SEM) for local feature matching, which can leverage the geometric information in an iterative matching way. The proposed model enjoys several merits. First, our proposed Structured Feature Extractor can model the relative po- sitional relationship between pixels and high-confidence anchor points. Second, our proposed Epipolar Attention and Matching can filter out irrelevant areas by utilizing the epipolar constraint. Extensive experimental results on five standard benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of our SEM compared to state-of-the-art methods.


Overview video (6:24)



Pipeline Overview


WIP


Performance


WIP

Visualizations


WIP

Citation


@inproceedings{chang2023structured,
    title={Structured Epipolar Matcher for Local Feature Matching},
    author={Chang, Jiahao and Yu, Jiahuan and Zhang, Tianzhu},
    booktitle={Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition},
    pages={6176--6185},
    year={2023}
}