AffineGlue: Joint Matching and Robust Estimation

We propose AffineGlue, a method for joint two-view feature matching and robust estimation that reduces the combinatorial complexity of the problem by employing single-point minimal solvers. AffineGlue selects potential matches from one-to-many correspondences to estimate minimal models. Guided matching is then used to find matches consistent with the model, suffering less from the ambiguities of one-to-one matches. Moreover, we derive a new minimal solver for homography estimation, requiring only a single affine correspondence (AC) and a gravity prior. Furthermore, we train a neural network to reject ACs that are unlikely to lead to a good model. AffineGlue is superior to the SOTA on real-world datasets, even when assuming that the gravity direction points downwards. On PhotoTourism, the AUC@10{\deg} score is improved by 6.6 points compared to the SOTA. On ScanNet, AffineGlue makes SuperPoint and SuperGlue achieve similar accuracy as the detector-free LoFTR.

LightGlue: Local Feature Matching at Light Speed

We introduce LightGlue, a deep neural network that learns to match local features across images. We revisit multiple design decisions of SuperGlue, the state of the art in sparse matching, and derive simple but effective improvements. Cumulatively, they make LightGlue more efficient - in terms of both memory and computation, more accurate, and much easier to train. One key property is that LightGlue is adaptive to the difficulty of the problem: the inference is much faster on image pairs that are intuitively easy to match, for example because of a larger visual overlap or limited appearance change. This opens up exciting prospects for deploying deep matchers in latency-sensitive applications like 3D reconstruction. The code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/cvg/LightGlue.

SNAP: Self-Supervised Neural Maps for Visual Positioning and Semantic Understanding

Semantic 2D maps are commonly used by humans and machines for navigation purposes, whether it's walking or driving. However, these maps have limitations: they lack detail, often contain inaccuracies, and are difficult to create and maintain, especially in an automated fashion. Can we use raw imagery to automatically create better maps that can be easily interpreted by both humans and machines? We introduce SNAP, a deep network that learns rich neural 2D maps from ground-level and overhead images. We train our model to align neural maps estimated from different inputs, supervised only with camera poses over tens of millions of StreetView images. SNAP can resolve the location of challenging image queries beyond the reach of traditional methods, outperforming the state of the art in localization by a large margin. Moreover, our neural maps encode not only geometry and appearance but also high-level semantics, discovered without explicit supervision. This enables effective pre-training for data-efficient semantic scene understanding, with the potential to unlock cost-efficient creation of more detailed maps.

OrienterNet: Visual Localization in 2D Public Maps with Neural Matching

Humans can orient themselves in their 3D environments using simple 2D maps. Differently, algorithms for visual localization mostly rely on complex 3D point clouds that are expensive to build, store, and maintain over time. We bridge this gap by introducing OrienterNet, the first deep neural network that can localize an image with sub-meter accuracy using the same 2D semantic maps that humans use. OrienterNet estimates the location and orientation of a query image by matching a neural Bird's-Eye View with open and globally available maps from OpenStreetMap, enabling anyone to localize anywhere such maps are available. OrienterNet is supervised only by camera poses but learns to perform semantic matching with a wide range of map elements in an end-to-end manner. To enable this, we introduce a large crowd-sourced dataset of images captured across 12 cities from the diverse viewpoints of cars, bikes, and pedestrians. OrienterNet generalizes to new datasets and pushes the state of the art in both robotics and AR scenarios. The code and trained model will be released publicly.

LaMAR: Benchmarking Localization and Mapping for Augmented Reality

Localization and mapping is the foundational technology for augmented reality (AR) that enables sharing and persistence of digital content in the real world. While significant progress has been made, researchers are still mostly driven by unrealistic benchmarks not representative of real-world AR scenarios. These benchmarks are often based on small-scale datasets with low scene diversity, captured from stationary cameras, and lack other sensor inputs like inertial, radio, or depth data. Furthermore, their ground-truth (GT) accuracy is mostly insufficient to satisfy AR requirements. To close this gap, we introduce LaMAR, a new benchmark with a comprehensive capture and GT pipeline that co-registers realistic trajectories and sensor streams captured by heterogeneous AR devices in large, unconstrained scenes. To establish an accurate GT, our pipeline robustly aligns the trajectories against laser scans in a fully automated manner. As a result, we publish a benchmark dataset of diverse and large-scale scenes recorded with head-mounted and hand-held AR devices. We extend several state-of-the-art methods to take advantage of the AR-specific setup and evaluate them on our benchmark. The results offer new insights on current research and reveal promising avenues for future work in the field of localization and mapping for AR.

Pixel-Perfect Structure-from-Motion with Featuremetric Refinement

Finding local features that are repeatable across multiple views is a cornerstone of sparse 3D reconstruction. The classical image matching paradigm detects keypoints per-image once and for all, which can yield poorly-localized features and propagate large errors to the final geometry. In this paper, we refine two key steps of structure-from-motion by a direct alignment of low-level image information from multiple views: we first adjust the initial keypoint locations prior to any geometric estimation, and subsequently refine points and camera poses as a post-processing. This refinement is robust to large detection noise and appearance changes, as it optimizes a featuremetric error based on dense features predicted by a neural network. This significantly improves the accuracy of camera poses and scene geometry for a wide range of keypoint detectors, challenging viewing conditions, and off-the-shelf deep features. Our system easily scales to large image collections, enabling pixel-perfect crowd-sourced localization at scale. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/cvg/pixel-perfect-sfm as an add-on to the popular SfM software COLMAP.

Back to the Feature: Learning Robust Camera Localization from Pixels to Pose

Camera pose estimation in known scenes is a 3D geometry task recently tackled by multiple learning algorithms. Many regress precise geometric quantities, like poses or 3D points, from an input image. This either fails to generalize to new viewpoints or ties the model parameters to a specific scene. In this paper, we go Back to the Feature: we argue that deep networks should focus on learning robust and invariant visual features, while the geometric estimation should be left to principled algorithms. We introduce PixLoc, a scene-agnostic neural network that estimates an accurate 6-DoF pose from an image and a 3D model. Our approach is based on the direct alignment of multiscale deep features, casting camera localization as metric learning. PixLoc learns strong data priors by end-to-end training from pixels to pose and exhibits exceptional generalization to new scenes by separating model parameters and scene geometry. The system can localize in large environments given coarse pose priors but also improve the accuracy of sparse feature matching by jointly refining keypoints and poses with little overhead. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/cvg/pixloc.

SuperGlue: Learning Feature Matching with Graph Neural Networks

This paper introduces SuperGlue, a neural network that matches two sets of local features by jointly finding correspondences and rejecting non-matchable points. Assignments are estimated by solving a differentiable optimal transport problem, whose costs are predicted by a graph neural network. We introduce a flexible context aggregation mechanism based on attention, enabling SuperGlue to reason about the underlying 3D scene and feature assignments jointly. Compared to traditional, hand-designed heuristics, our technique learns priors over geometric transformations and regularities of the 3D world through end-to-end training from image pairs. SuperGlue outperforms other learned approaches and achieves state-of-the-art results on the task of pose estimation in challenging real-world indoor and outdoor environments. The proposed method performs matching in real-time on a modern GPU and can be readily integrated into modern SfM or SLAM systems.

The Fishyscapes Benchmark: Measuring Blind Spots in Semantic Segmentation

Deep learning has enabled impressive progress in the accuracy of semantic segmentation. Yet, the ability to estimate uncertainty and detect failure is key for safety-critical applications like autonomous driving. Existing uncertainty estimates have mostly been evaluated on simple tasks, and it is unclear whether these methods generalize to more complex scenarios. We present Fishyscapes, the first public benchmark for uncertainty estimation in a real-world task of semantic segmentation for urban driving. It evaluates pixel-wise uncertainty estimates and covers the detection of both out-of-distribution objects and misclassifications. We adapt state-of-the-art methods to recent semantic segmentation models and compare approaches based on softmax confidence, Bayesian learning, and embedding density. A thorough evaluation of these methods reveals a clear gap to their alleged capabilities. Our results show that failure detection is far from solved even for ordinary situations, while our benchmark allows measuring advancements beyond the state-of-the-art.