Image Matching

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Overview

Image matching estimates which pixels, features, or objects in separate images depict the same scene content, supporting image registration, 3D reconstruction, localization, and retrieval. Methods range from SIFT and ORB keypoints with geometric verification to learned local descriptors, sparse matchers, and semi-dense or dense transformer models. Recent approaches combine coarse-to-fine refinement, geometric constraints, and pretrained vision features, and are evaluated on tasks such as homography and pose estimation, stereo, and cross-view matching. A central challenge is making matches both geometrically reliable under major appearance or sensor changes and efficient enough for practical use; semantic similarity alone does not ensure a valid correspondence.

Latest papers

CardsList

88 papers15 papers in the last four weeks, up 150% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Comprehensive empirical evaluation of feature extractors in computer vision

    Oct 29, 2026Murat IsikKeypoint DetectionLocal Feature Matching

    Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, Kirsehir Ahi Evran University, Kirsehir, Turkey

  2. FlexGlue: Sparse-to-Dense Feature Matching and Visual Disambiguation

    Oct 23, 2026Philipp Lindenberger, Paul-Edouard Sarlin, Ondrej Miksik +1Image MatchingCross-View Image Matching

    ETH Zurich · Google · Microsoft Spatial AI Lab

  3. MVLoMa: Multi-View Local Feature Matching with Any Geometry Foundation Model

    Oct 22, 2026Xinyang Lu, Shengzhe Wei, Sheng Tang +3Image MatchingCross-View Image Matching

    Kosmo Research · School of Astronautics, Harbin Institute of Technology · School of Software, Tsinghua University

  4. LocalAgent: Collaborative Agentic Verification for Fine-Grained Instance-Level Consistency

    Oct 21, 2026Jiachen Guo, Xinshan Zhu, Boyun Wang +4Image MatchingTool Use in VLMs

    School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University · SCSE, Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST) · AIX, University of Macau +2

  5. LateMatch: Breaking the Interaction Bottleneck via Cacheable Matching for Efficient Visual Localization

    Oct 18, 2026Mohammad Omama, Aeyan Ashraf, Sandeep ChinchaliImage MatchingVisual Place Recognition

    The University of Texas at Austin · University of Massachusetts Amherst

  6. CLAD: Keypoint Matching Using Global Line Correspondences

    Oct 15, 2026Masaki SatohImage MatchingLocal Feature Matching

    Morpho, Inc. Tokyo, Japan

  7. A unified three-branch deep learning framework for automated detection and counting of wildlife in aerial imagery

    Oct 12, 2026Zeyu Xu, Tiejun Wang, Andrew Skidmore +5Image MatchingWildlife Monitoring

    School of Geospatial Engineering and Science, Sun Yat-Sen University, Zhuhai, China · Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands · Boma and Badingilo National Parks, African Parks, Juba, South Sudan +3

  8. Fix the Match, Not the Solver: STITCH -- a Self-Supervised Compatibility Measure for Eroded Visual Puzzles

    Oct 9, 2026Nadav Alali, Ohad Ben-ShaharJigsaw Puzzle SolvingImage Matching

    Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel

  9. Beyond Spatio-Temporal Priors: A Generalizable Approach for Dense Correspondence Matching

    Oct 8, 2026Luping Liu, Bingyi Kang, Yifan Wang +1Image Matching

    The University of Hong Kong · ByteDance Seed · Zhejiang University

  10. Beyond Resolution: Object-to-Image Ratio Mismatch in Instance Retrieval

    Oct 8, 2026Boaz Meivar, Ofir Kedem, Amit Edenzon +2Image RetrievalRetrieval Robustness

    Tel Aviv University · Bar-Ilan University

  11. An Invariant Tangent-Angle Descriptor and a Band U-Net for 2D Fragment Adjacency Prediction

    Oct 7, 2026Guillaume Brouillette, Alain Goupil, Pierre-Olivier Parisé +1Image Matching

    Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, Trois-Rivières, Canada

  12. WildMatch: Weakly Supervised Image Matcher Adaptation for Wildlife Re-Identification

    Oct 5, 2026Turhan Can Kargin, Piotr Kubaty, Ekaterina Rostovskaya +3Animal Re-IdentificationImage Matching

    Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Jagiellonian University, Poland · Doctoral School of Exact and Natural Sciences, Jagiellonian University, Poland · Institute of Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Biology, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland +2

  13. Geometry-Aligned Semantic Matching for Cross-Modal Planar Image Registration

    Oct 2, 2026Zhiwei Wang, Defeng He, Yuxing Li +2Image MatchingCross-Modal Image Registration

  14. Front-to-Back: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Asymmetric Cross-View Vehicle Re-Identification

    Sep 30, 2026Moseli Mots'oehli, Thulani BabeliVLM EvaluationImage Matching

    MindForge AI, Johannesburg, South Africa · University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, Honolulu, HI, USA

  15. UltraMatch: Transport Path Routing for Ultra-Fast and Memory-Efficient Image Matching

    Sep 29, 2026Jiajun Le, Yifan Lu, Zizhuo Li +3Image MatchingMemory-Efficient Inference

    Electronic Information School, Wuhan University, China · Xiaomi Corporation, China · School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, China +1

  16. SCCM: Spherically Consistent Coarse Matching for ERP Dense Feature Correspondence

    Sep 29, 2026Gyeonggwan Lee, Eunsoo Im, Seunghwan Hong +1Image Matching

    Kakao Mobility Corp., Seongnam, Republic of Korea · Korea University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

  17. MatcherCompass: A Deployment-Aware Benchmark to Guide Image Matcher Selection in the Wild

    Sep 22, 2026Hyunwoo Kim, Giseop KimImage MatchingCross-Modal Feature Matching

    Department of Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering, DGIST, Daegu, Republic of Korea

  18. What Survives on Real Drawings: Active Sampling, Connectome Wiring, and Matched Baselines in Architectural Document Vision

    Sep 21, 2026Dmitry KuklevVisual Representation LearningImage Matching

    Independent Researcher

  19. Scale-Vector Alignment: A Scale-Aware Framework for Spatially Resolved Morphological Similarity in Astronomical Images

    Sep 21, 2026Mengke Zhao, Guang-Xing Li, Keping Qiu +1Image Matching

    School of Astronomy and Space Science, Nanjing University, 163 Xianlin Avenue, Nanjing 210023, Jiangsu, People’s Republic of China · Key Laboratory of Modern Astronomy and Astrophysics (Nanjing University), Ministry of Education, Nanjing 210023, Jiangsu, People’s Republic of China · South-Western Institute for Astronomy Research, Yunnan University, Kunming 650500, People’s Republic of China

  20. G3AR: Graph-Guided Neural Visual Geometry for Scalable Multi-Sequence Aerial Registration

    Sep 15, 2026Jeng Wen Joshua Lean, Ting-Yu Yen, Wei-Fang Sun +3Multi-View GeometryNeural Representation Geometry

    National Tsing Hua University Hsinchu, Taiwan · NVIDIA AI Technology Center Taiwan · NVIDIA AI Technology Center Singapore

  21. RoMa-ΩΩ: What Feed-Forward 3D Models Know About Image Matching

    Sep 8, 2026David Nordström, Xinyue Zhang, Thibaut Loiseau +2Image Matching3D Representation Learning

    Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden · Mobile Perception Lab, ShanghaiTech University, China · LIGM, Ecole des Ponts, Univ. Gustave Eiffel, CNRS, France

  22. POI-Loc: A Fine-Grained POI Localization Benchmark and an Asymmetric Global-to-Local Matching Method

    Sep 2, 2026Lu Han, Xiting Sun, Hao Wang +4Image MatchingVisual Place Recognition

    Amap, Alibaba Group, Beijing, China

  23. Cross-Spectral Dense Correspondence for Multimodal Spectral Medical Imaging

    Aug 28, 2026Eric L. Wisotzky, Jost Triller, Simon W. Härtl +3Image MatchingCross-Modal Feature Matching

    Vision & Imaging Technologies, Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute HHI, Berlin, Germany · Visual Computing, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany · Functional Imaging in Surgical Oncology, National Center for Tumordiseases, Dresden, Germany

  24. SSMB: Self-Supervised Local Feature Detection under Motion Blur

    Aug 27, 2026Zhenjun Zhao, Fabio Bellavia, Wenting Wang +6Keypoint DetectionImage Matching

    University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain · University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy · The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China +5

  25. Misanthrope: A Privacy-Preserving Keypoint Detector

    Aug 24, 2026Francesco Vultaggio, Predrag Djindjic, Markus Gerke +2Keypoint DetectionPrivacy-Preserving ML

    Austrian Institute of Technology, Assistive & Autonomous Systems Vienna 1210, Austria. · Technical University of Braunschweig, Institute of Geodesy and Photogrammetry Braunschweig 38106, Germany. · University of Vienna, Data Mining and Machine Learning Vienna 1090, Austria.

  26. Self-Calibrating Dense Displacement Fields for Reliable Co-Registration of Large Optical Satellite Imagery

    Aug 23, 2026Shoukun Sun, Zhe Wang, Sanaz Salati +3Deformable Image RegistrationImage Matching

    Department of Computer Science, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID 83844 USA · National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93101 USA · Research Computing and Data Services (RCDS), University of Idaho, Moscow, ID 83844 USA +1

  27. RIPE++: Reinforced Keypoint Learning from Positive Pairs Only

    Aug 20, 2026Johannes Künzel, Peter Eisert, Anna HilsmannRepresentation LearningReinforcement Learning

    Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institute, HHI, Germany · Humboldt University Berlin, Germany

  28. Evaluation of Image Matching Methods for Visual Odometry on UAVs

    Aug 19, 2026Gašper Spagnolo, Luka Čehovin Zajc, Matej DobrevskiVisual OdometryImage Matching

    Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, Večna pot 113, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

  29. Online Learning of Correspondences between Images

    Aug 13, 2026Michael Felsberg, Fredrik Larsson, Johan Wiklund +2Multi-View GeometryImage Matching

    Computer Vision Laboratory, Dept. Electrical Engineering, Linköping University, Sweden · Division of Information Systems, FOI Swedish Defence Research Agency, Sweden · Termisk Systemteknik AB, Sweden

  30. Alignment of Similarity-Transformed Images Based on Fourier--Mellin Transform Using Auxiliary Function Method

    Aug 12, 2026Shinji Yamashita, Yuma Kinoshita, Hitoshi KiyaImage Matching

    Tokai University, Japan · Tokyo Metropolitan University, Japan