GeoGlue: feature matching with self-supervised geometric priors for high-resolution UAV images

We present GeoGlue, a novel method using high-resolution UAV imagery for accurate feature matching, which is normally challenging due to the complicated scenes. Current feature detection methods are performed without guidance of geometric priors (e.g., geometric lines), lacking enough attention given to salient geometric features which are indispensable for accurate matching due to their stable existence across views. In this work, geometric lines are firstly detected by a CNN-based geometry detector (GD) which is pre-trained in a self-supervised manner through automatically generated images. Then, geometric lines are naturally vectorized based on GD and thus non-significant features can be disregarded as judged by their disordered geometric morphology. A graph attention network (GAT) is utilized for final feature matching, spanning across the image pair with geometric priors informed by GD. Comprehensive experiments show that GeoGlue outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in feature-matching accuracy and performance stability, achieving pose estimation with maximum rotation and translation errors under 1% in challenging scenes from benchmark datasets, Tanks & Temples and ETH3D. This study also proposes the first self-supervised deep-learning model for curved line detection, generating geometric priors for matching so that more attention is put on prominent features and improving the visual effect of 3D reconstruction.