Researchers From ETH Zurich and Microsoft Introduce LightGlue: A Deep Neural Network That Learns To Match Local Features Across Images

Matching corresponding points between images is crucial to many computer vision applications, such as camera tracking and 3D mapping. The conventional approach involves using sparse interest points and high-dimensional representations to match them based on their visual appearance. However, accurately describing each issue becomes challenging in scenarios with symmetries, weak texture, or variations in viewpoint and lighting. Additionally, these representations should be able to distinguish outliers caused by occlusion and missing points. Balancing the objectives of robustness and uniqueness proves to be complicated.

To address these limitations, a research team from ETH Zurich and Microsoft introduced a novel paradigm called LightGlue. LightGlue utilizes a deep network that simultaneously considers both images to match sparse points and reject outliers jointly. The network incorporates the Transformer model, which learns to match challenging image pairs by leveraging large datasets. This approach has demonstrated robust image-matching capabilities in indoor and outdoor environments. LightGlue has proven to be highly effective for visual localization in challenging conditions and has shown promising performance in other tasks, including aerial matching, object pose estimation, and fish re-identification.

Despite its effectiveness, the original approach, known as “SuperGlue,” is computationally expensive, making it unsuitable for tasks requiring low latency or high processing volumes. Additionally, training SuperGlue models is notoriously challenging and demands significant computing resources. As a result, subsequent attempts to improve the SuperGlue model have failed to improve its performance. However, since the publication of SuperGlue, there have been significant advancements and applications of Transformer models in language and vision tasks. In response, the researchers designed LightGlue as a more accurate, efficient, and easier-to-train alternative to SuperGlue. They reexamined the design choices and introduced numerous simple yet effective architectural modifications. By distilling a recipe for training high-performance deep matches with limited resources, the team achieved state-of-the-art accuracy within a few GPU days.

LightGlue offers a Pareto-optimal solution, striking a balance between efficiency and accuracy. Unlike previous approaches, LightGlue adapts to the difficulty of each image pair. It predicts correspondences after each computational block and dynamically determines whether further computation is necessary based on confidence. By discarding unmatchable points early on, LightGlue focuses on the area of interest, improving efficiency.

Experimental results demonstrate that LightGlue outperforms existing sparse and dense matches. It is a seamless replacement for SuperGlue, delivering intense matches from local features while significantly reducing runtime. This advancement opens up exciting opportunities for deploying deep matches in latency-sensitive applications, such as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and reconstructing more significant scenes from crowd-sourced data.

The LightGlue model and training code will be publicly available under a permissive license. This release empowers researchers and practitioners to utilize LightGlue’s capabilities and contribute to advancing computer vision applications that require efficient and accurate image matching.

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