Matching Semantically Similar Non-Identical Objects

Yusuke Marumo, Kazuhiko Kawamoto, Satomi Tanaka, Shigenobu Hirano, Hiroshi Kera; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2026, pp. 2752-2764

Not identical but similar objects are ubiquitous in our world, ranging from four-legged animals such as dogs and cats to cars of different models and flowers of various colors. This study addresses a novel task of matching such non-identical objects at the pixel level. We propose a weighting scheme of descriptors, Semantic Enhancement Weighting (SEW), that incorporates semantic information from object detectors into existing sparse feature matching methods, extending their targets from identical objects captured from different perspectives to semantically similar objects. The experiments show successful matching between non-identical objects in various cases, including in-class design variations, class discrepancy, and domain shifts (e.g., photo vs. drawing and image corruptions). The code is available at https://github.com/Circ-Leaf/NIOM.