Feature Matching via Topology-Aware Graph Interaction Model

Feature matching plays a key role in computer vision. However, due to the limitations of the descriptors, the putative matches are inevitably contaminated by massive outliers. This paper attempts to tackle the outlier filtering problem from two aspects. First, a robust and efficient graph interaction model, is proposed, with the assumption that matches are correlated with each other rather than independently distributed. To this end, we construct a graph based on the local relationships of matches and formulate the outlier filtering task as a binary labeling energy minimization problem, where the pairwise term encodes the interaction between matches. We further show that this formulation can be solved globally by graph cut algorithm. Our new formulation always improves the performance of previous locality-based method without noticeable deterioration in processing time, adding a few milliseconds. Second, to construct a better graph structure, a robust and geometrically meaningful topology-aware relationship is developed to capture the topology relationship between matches. The two components in sum lead to topology interaction matching (TIM), an effective and efficient method for outlier filtering. Extensive experiments on several large and diverse datasets for multiple vision tasks including general feature matching, as well as relative pose estimation, homography and fundamental matrix estimation, loop-closure detection, and multi-modal image matching, demonstrate that our TIM is more competitive than current state-of-the-art methods, in terms of generality, efficiency, and effectiveness. The source code is publicly available at http://github.com/YifanLu2000/TIM.