In recent years, the learned local descriptors have outperformed handcrafted ones by a large margin, due to the powerful deep convolutional neural network architectures such as L2-Net [1] and triplet based metric learning [2]. However, there are two problems in the current methods, which hinders the overall performance. Firstly, the widely-used margin loss is sensitive to incorrect correspondences, which are prevalent in the existing local descriptor learning datasets. Second, the L2 distance ignores the fact that the feature vectors have been normalized to unit norm. To tackle these two problems and further boost the performance, we propose a robust angular loss which (1) uses cosine similarity instead of L2 distance to compare descriptors and (2) relies on a robust loss function that gives smaller penalty to triplets with negative relative similarity. The resulting descriptor shows robustness on different datasets, reaching the state-of-the-art result on Brown dataset, as well as demonstrating excellent generalization ability on the Hpatches dataset and a Wide Baseline Stereo dataset.
Recent work on local descriptor designing has gone through a huge change from conventional hand-crafted descriptors to learning-based approaches, which ranges from SIFT @cite_27 and DAISY @cite_16 to latest methods such as DeepCompare, MatchNet, and HardNet @cite_19 @cite_7 @cite_20 @cite_5 . As for deep learning-based descriptors, there are two study trends including CNN structure designing and negative sampling for embedding learning.
@cite_7 @cite_19 @cite_27 @cite_5 @cite_16 @cite_20
1577117850 2963157250 2884088147 2737260104
In this paper we propose a novel framework for learning local image descriptors in a discriminative manner. For this purpose we explore a siamese architecture of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), with a Hinge embedding loss on the L2 distance between descriptors. Since a siamese architecture uses pairs rather than single image patches to train, there exist a large number of positive samples and an exponential number of negative samples. We propose to explore this space with a stochastic sampling of the training set, in combination with an aggressive mining strategy over both the positive and negative samples which we denote as "fracking". We perform a thorough evaluation of the architecture hyper-parameters, and demonstrate large performance gains compared to both standard CNN learning strategies, hand-crafted image descriptors like SIFT, and the state-of-the-art on learned descriptors: up to 2.5x vs SIFT and 1.5x vs the state-of-the-art in terms of the area under the curve (AUC) of the Precision-Recall curve. We introduce a loss for metric learning, which is inspired by the Lowe's matching criterion for SIFT. We show that the proposed loss, that maximizes the distance between the closest positive and closest negative example in the batch, is better than complex regularization methods; it works well for both shallow and deep convolution network architectures. Applying the novel loss to the L2Net CNN architecture results in a compact descriptor named HardNet. It has the same dimensionality as SIFT (128) and shows state-of-art performance in wide baseline stereo, patch verification and instance retrieval benchmarks. Learned local descriptors based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have achieved significant improvements on patch-based benchmarks, whereas not having demonstrated strong generalization ability on recent benchmarks of image-based 3D reconstruction. In this paper, we mitigate this limitation by proposing a novel local descriptor learning approach that integrates geometry constraints from multi-view reconstructions, which benefits the learning process in terms of data generation, data sampling and loss computation. We refer to the proposed descriptor as GeoDesc, and demonstrate its superior performance on various large-scale benchmarks, and in particular show its great success on challenging reconstruction tasks. Moreover, we provide guidelines towards practical integration of learned descriptors in Structure-from-Motion (SfM) pipelines, showing the good trade-off that GeoDesc delivers to 3D reconstruction tasks between accuracy and efficiency. The research focus of designing local patch descriptors has gradually shifted from handcrafted ones (e.g., SIFT) to learned ones. In this paper, we propose to learn high performance descriptor in Euclidean space via the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Our method is distinctive in four aspects: (i) We propose a progressive sampling strategy which enables the network to access billions of training samples in a few epochs. (ii) Derived from the basic concept of local patch matching problem, we empha-size the relative distance between descriptors. (iii) Extra supervision is imposed on the intermediate feature maps. (iv) Compactness of the descriptor is taken into account. The proposed network is named as L2-Net since the output descriptor can be matched in Euclidean space by L2 distance. L2-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Brown datasets [16], Oxford dataset [18] and the newly proposed Hpatches dataset [11]. The good generalization ability shown by experiments indicates that L2-Net can serve as a direct substitution of the existing handcrafted descriptors. The pre-trained L2-Net is publicly available.