WovenAnchor Matcher: Specialized Intra- and Inter-Image Context Modeling for Feature Matching

Dense feature matching aims to estimate all correspondences between two images of a 3D scene and has recently been established as the gold standard due to its high accuracy and robustness. However, existing dense matchers still fail or perform poorly for many hard real-world scenarios, and high-precision models are often slow, limiting their applicability. In this paper, we attack these weaknesses on a wide front through a series of systematic improvements that together yield a significantly better model. In particular, we construct a novel matching architecture and loss, which, combined with a curated diverse training distribution, enables our model to solve many complex matching tasks. We further make training faster through a decoupled two-stage matching-then-refinement pipeline, and at the same time, significantly reduce refinement memory usage through a custom CUDA kernel. Finally, we leverage the recent DINOv3 foundation model along with multiple other insights to make the model more robust and unbiased. In our extensive set of experiments, we show that the resulting novel matcher sets a new state-of-the-art, being significantly more accurate than its predecessors. Code is available at https://github.com/Parskatt/romav2

Reliable correspondence estimation is a fundamental problem in image processing, underpinning applications such as Structure from Motion, visual localization, and image registration. Existing learning-based methods have significantly improved local feature representations, yet most still operate at the pixel or patch level and lack explicit modeling of regions that are jointly visible across views. We propose SAMatcher, a feature matching framework that formulates correspondence estimation through co-visibility modeling. Instead of directly matching local features, SAMatcher first predicts co-visible region masks and bounding boxes as structured priors for correspondence estimation. Built upon the Segment Anything Model (SAM), it introduces a symmetric cross-view interaction mechanism that enables bidirectional feature exchange and cross-view semantic alignment. We further develop a unified supervision scheme that jointly optimizes mask prediction and box localization through mask learning, box regression, and mask-box consistency constraints. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks demonstrate substantial improvements over existing matching pipelines, particularly under large viewpoint and scale variations. Our results show that foundation models originally designed for monocular segmentation can be effectively extended to multi-view correspondence reasoning through explicit co-visibility modeling, offering a new perspective on structured representation learning for image matching. Code and project page: https://xupan.top/Projects/samatcher

Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) have significantly advanced dense feature matching, yet severe in-plane rotation remains a critical challenge. Existing solutions face a fundamental dilemma: data-driven methods require inefficient parameter scaling to implicitly learn rotations, whereas strictly equivariant networks lack the semantic capacity of modern VFMs. Consequently, current frameworks typically freeze VFMs and shift the entire burden of rotation generalization to the downstream decoder. To break this architectural bottleneck, we propose REDI-Match, an efficient framework driven by a novel Rotation-Equivariant Distillation (REDI) paradigm. Instead of relying on rotation data augmentation to establish rotational correspondences, REDI distills the non-equivariant semantic representations of a VFM into a lightweight, strictly rotation-equivariant encoder, leveraging an equivariant geometric architecture to constrain robust high-dimensional semantics. To fully exploit these features, we equip the decoder with an entropy-driven spatial alignment module. By evaluating discrete rotation hypotheses, this mechanism explicitly locks onto the canonical coordinate system, eliminating global ambiguity before continuous refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that REDI-Match establishes a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) across multiple benchmarks. Notably, it achieves a 13.89% absolute pose accuracy improvement on the highly challenging SatAst dataset while operating 1.9x faster than the current SOTA (RoMa v2), enabling real-time inference (~41 FPS) on a single RTX 4090 GPU. Code: https://github.com/YinjiGe/REDI-Match.