PUMP: Pyramidal and Uniqueness Matching Priors for Unsupervised Learning of Local Descriptors

Existing approaches for learning local image descriptors have shown remarkable achievements in a wide range of geometric tasks. However, most of them require per-pixel correspondence-level supervision, which is difficult to acquire at scale and in high quality. In this paper, we propose to explicitly integrate two matching priors in a single loss in order to learn local descriptors without supervision. Given two images depicting the same scene, we extract pixel descriptors and build a correlation volume. The first prior enforces the local consistency of matches in this volume via a pyramidal structure iteratively constructed using a non-parametric module. The second prior exploits the fact that each descriptor should match with at most one descriptor from the other image. We combine our unsupervised loss with a standard self-supervised loss trained from synthetic image augmentations. Feature descriptors learned by the proposed approach outperform their fully- and self-supervised counterparts on various geometric benchmarks such as visual localization and image matching, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Project webpage: https://europe.naverlabs.com/research/3d-vision/pump.