Hugo Germain

Gil Avraham, Julian Straub, Tianwei Shen et al. · mit

This paper presents a framework that combines traditional keypoint-based camera pose optimization with an invertible neural rendering mechanism. Our proposed 3D scene representation, Nerfels, is locally dense yet globally sparse. As opposed to existing invertible neural rendering systems which overfit a model to the entire scene, we adopt a feature-driven approach for representing scene-agnostic, local 3D patches with renderable codes. By modelling a scene only where local features are detected, our framework effectively generalizes to unseen local regions in the scene via an optimizable code conditioning mechanism in the neural renderer, all while maintaining the low memory footprint of a sparse 3D map representation. Our model can be incorporated to existing state-of-the-art hand-crafted and learned local feature pose estimators, yielding improved performance when evaluating on ScanNet for wide camera baseline scenarios.

Matthieu Vilain, Rémi Giraud, Hugo Germain et al.

Semi-dense detector-free approaches (SDF), such as LoFTR, are currently among the most popular image matching methods. While SDF methods are trained to establish correspondences between two images, their performances are almost exclusively evaluated using relative pose estimation metrics. Thus, the link between their ability to establish correspondences and the quality of the resulting estimated pose has thus far received little attention. This paper is a first attempt to study this link. We start with proposing a novel structured attention-based image matching architecture (SAM). It allows us to show a counter-intuitive result on two datasets (MegaDepth and HPatches): on the one hand SAM either outperforms or is on par with SDF methods in terms of pose/homography estimation metrics, but on the other hand SDF approaches are significantly better than SAM in terms of matching accuracy. We then propose to limit the computation of the matching accuracy to textured regions, and show that in this case SAM often surpasses SDF methods. Our findings highlight a strong correlation between the ability to establish accurate correspondences in textured regions and the accuracy of the resulting estimated pose/homography. Our code will be made available.

Paul-Edouard Sarlin, Ajaykumar Unagar, Måns Larsson et al.

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.

Hugo Germain, Vincent Lepetit, Guillaume Bourmaud

Given a pair of partially overlapping source and target images and a keypoint in the source image, the keypoint's correspondent in the target image can be either visible, occluded or outside the field of view. Local feature matching methods are only able to identify the correspondent's location when it is visible, while humans can also hallucinate its location when it is occluded or outside the field of view through geometric reasoning. In this paper, we bridge this gap by training a network to output a peaked probability distribution over the correspondent's location, regardless of this correspondent being visible, occluded, or outside the field of view. We experimentally demonstrate that this network is indeed able to hallucinate correspondences on pairs of images captured in scenes that were not seen at training-time. We also apply this network to an absolute camera pose estimation problem and find it is significantly more robust than state-of-the-art local feature matching-based competitors.

Hugo Germain, Guillaume Bourmaud, Vincent Lepetit

Establishing robust and accurate correspondences is a fundamental backbone to many computer vision algorithms. While recent learning-based feature matching methods have shown promising results in providing robust correspondences under challenging conditions, they are often limited in terms of precision. In this paper, we introduce S2DNet, a novel feature matching pipeline, designed and trained to efficiently establish both robust and accurate correspondences. By leveraging a sparse-to-dense matching paradigm, we cast the correspondence learning problem as a supervised classification task to learn to output highly peaked correspondence maps. We show that S2DNet achieves state-of-the-art results on the HPatches benchmark, as well as on several long-term visual localization datasets.