Geometric Image Correspondence Verification by Dense Pixel Matching

Zakaria Laskar, Iaroslav Melekhov, Hamed Rezazadegan Tavakoli, Juha Ylioinas, Juho Kannala; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2020, pp. 2521-2530

This paper addresses the problem of determining dense pixel correspondences between two images and its application to geometric correspondence verification in image retrieval. The main contribution is a geometric correspondence verification approach for re-ranking a shortlist of retrieved database images based on their dense pair-wise matching with the query image at a pixel level. We determine a set of cyclically consistent dense pixel matches between the pair of images and evaluate local similarity of matched pixels using neural network based image descriptors. Final re-ranking is based on a novel similarity function, which fuses the local similarity metric with a global similarity metric and a geometric consistency measure computed for the matched pixels. For dense matching our approach utilizes a modified version of a recently proposed dense geometric correspondence network (DGC-Net), which we also improve by optimizing the architecture. The proposed model and similarity metric compare favourably to the state-of-the-art image retrieval methods. In addition, we apply our method to the problem of long-term visual localization demonstrating promising results and generalization across datasets.