MESA: Matching Everything by Segmenting Anything

Yesheng Zhang, Xu Zhao; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 20217-20226

Feature matching is a crucial task in the field of computer vision which involves finding correspondences between images. Previous studies achieve remarkable performance using learning-based feature comparison. However the pervasive presence of matching redundancy between images gives rise to unnecessary and error-prone computations in these methods imposing limitations on their accuracy. To address this issue we propose MESA a novel approach to establish precise area (or region) matches for efficient matching redundancy reduction. MESA first leverages the advanced image understanding capability of SAM a state-of-the-art foundation model for image segmentation to obtain image areas with implicit semantic. Then a multi-relational graph is proposed to model the spatial structure of these areas and construct their scale hierarchy. Based on graphical models derived from the graph the area matching is reformulated as an energy minimization task and effectively resolved. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MESA yields substantial precision improvement for multiple point matchers in indoor and outdoor downstream tasks e.g. +13.61% for DKM in indoor pose estimation.