DKM: Dense Kernelized Feature Matching for Geometry Estimation

Johan Edstedt, Ioannis Athanasiadis, Mårten Wadenbäck, Michael Felsberg; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 17765-17775

Feature matching is a challenging computer vision task that involves finding correspondences between two images of a 3D scene. In this paper we consider the dense approach instead of the more common sparse paradigm, thus striving to find all correspondences. Perhaps counter-intuitively, dense methods have previously shown inferior performance to their sparse and semi-sparse counterparts for estimation of two-view geometry. This changes with our novel dense method, which outperforms both dense and sparse methods on geometry estimation. The novelty is threefold: First, we propose a kernel regression global matcher. Secondly, we propose warp refinement through stacked feature maps and depthwise convolution kernels. Thirdly, we propose learning dense confidence through consistent depth and a balanced sampling approach for dense confidence maps. Through extensive experiments we confirm that our proposed dense method, Dense Kernelized Feature Matching, sets a new state-of-the-art on multiple geometry estimation benchmarks. In particular, we achieve an improvement on MegaDepth-1500 of +4.9 and +8.9 AUC@5 compared to the best previous sparse method and dense method respectively. Our code is provided at the following repository: https://github.com/Parskatt/DKM