Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R

Vincent Leroy*, Yohann Cabon, Jerome Revaud ;

"Image Matching is a core component of all best-performing algorithms and pipelines in 3D vision. Yet despite matching being fundamentally a 3D problem, intrinsically linked to camera pose and scene geometry, it is typically treated as a 2D problem. This makes sense as the goal of matching is to establish correspondences between 2D pixel fields, but also seems like a potentially hazardous choice. In this work, we take a different stance and propose to cast matching as a 3D task with , a recent and powerful 3D reconstruction framework based on Transformers. Based on pointmaps regression, this method displayed impressive robustness in matching views with extreme viewpoint changes, yet with limited accuracy. We aim here to improve the matching capabilities of such an approach while preserving its robustness. We thus propose to augment the network with a new head that outputs dense local features, trained with an additional matching loss. We further address the issue of quadratic complexity of dense matching, which becomes prohibitively slow for downstream applications if not treated carefully. We introduce a fast reciprocal matching scheme that not only accelerates matching by orders of magnitude, but also comes with theoretical guarantees and, lastly, yields improved results. Extensive experiments show that our approach, coined , significantly outperforms the state of the art on multiple matching tasks. In particular, it largely outperforms the best published methods on the challenging Map-free localization dataset."