Improving Feature-based Visual Localization by Geometry-Aided Matching
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Feature matching is an essential step in visual localization, where the accuracy of camera pose is mainly determined by the established 2D-3D correspondence. Due to the noise, solving the camera pose accurately requires a sufficient number of well-distributed 2D-3D correspondences. Existing 2D-3D feature matching is typically achieved by finding the nearest neighbors in the feature space, and then removing the outliers by some hand-crafted heuristics. However, this may lead to a large number of potentially true matches being missed or the established correct matches being filtered out. In this work, we introduce a novel 2D-3D matching method, Geometry-Aided Matching (GAM), which uses both appearance information and geometric context to improve 2D-3D feature matching. GAM can greatly strengthen the recall of 2D-3D matches while maintaining high precision. We insert GAM into a hierarchical visual localization pipeline and show that GAM can effectively improve the robustness and accuracy of localization. Extensive experiments show that GAM can find more correct matches than hand-crafted heuristics and learning baselines. Our proposed localization method achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple visual localization datasets. Experiments on Cambridge Landmarks dataset show that our method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods and is six times faster than the top-performed method.
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