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Enhancing Visible-Thermal Image Matching with Cross-modal Feature Matching Transformer (XoFTR)


Khái niệm cốt lõi
XoFTR, a novel cross-modal cross-view method for local feature matching between thermal infrared (TIR) and visible images, addresses the challenges of significant texture and intensity differences between the two modalities through masked image modeling pre-training and fine-tuning with pseudo-thermal image augmentation. It also introduces a refined matching pipeline that adjusts for scale discrepancies and enhances match reliability through sub-pixel level refinement.
Tóm tắt

The paper introduces XoFTR, a cross-modal cross-view method for local feature matching between thermal infrared (TIR) and visible images. Unlike visible images, TIR images are robust against adverse light and weather conditions but present difficulties in matching due to significant texture and intensity differences.

To address this, the authors propose a two-stage approach:

  1. Masked Image Modeling (MIM) pre-training: The network is pre-trained to reconstruct randomly masked visible-thermal image pairs, allowing it to learn intensity differences in the thermal and visible spectra.

  2. Fine-tuning with pseudo-thermal image augmentation: The authors introduce a robust augmentation method to generate pseudo-thermal images from visible images, enabling the network to adapt to modality-induced variations.

Additionally, the authors propose a refined matching pipeline that:

  • Adjusts for scale discrepancies by allowing one-to-one and one-to-many matches at 1/8 the original resolution during coarse matching.
  • Enhances match reliability through a fine matching module that re-matches coarse-level predictions at 1/2 scale and filters low-confidence matches.
  • Refines matches at the sub-pixel level using a regression mechanism to prevent a point in one image from matching with multiple points in the other.

The authors also introduce a new challenging visible-thermal image matching dataset, METU-VisTIR, covering a wide range of viewpoint differences and weather conditions.

Through extensive experiments, the authors demonstrate that XoFTR outperforms strong baselines, achieving state-of-the-art results in visible-thermal image matching and homography estimation tasks.

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Thống kê
Thermal images typically have lower resolution and field of view compared to visible images. Thermal and visible images have significant differences in texture characteristics and nonlinear intensity differences due to distinct radiation mechanisms.
Trích dẫn
"Unlike visible images, thermal infrared (TIR) images are robust against adverse light and weather conditions such as rain, fog, snow, and night [19, 40]." "To match TIR-visible images, many hand-crafted [10, 29, 35, 37, 45] and learning-based [1, 8, 15, 17, 55] methods have been proposed. Despite the promising results reported, performances across different viewpoints, scales, and poor textures have been sub-optimal."

Thông tin chi tiết chính được chắt lọc từ

by Önde... lúc arxiv.org 04-16-2024

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.09692.pdf
XoFTR: Cross-modal Feature Matching Transformer

Yêu cầu sâu hơn

How can the proposed augmentation method be extended to generate more realistic thermal images beyond the cosine transform

The proposed augmentation method, which involves generating pseudo-thermal images from visible images using the cosine transform, can be extended to create more realistic thermal images by incorporating additional image processing techniques. One approach could be to introduce noise patterns that mimic the characteristics of thermal noise commonly found in thermal infrared images. By adding noise to the generated pseudo-thermal images, the network can learn to better differentiate between real thermal features and artificially generated ones. Additionally, incorporating domain-specific knowledge about thermal imaging, such as temperature gradients and emissivity variations, can further enhance the realism of the generated thermal images. By combining these techniques with the cosine transform, the network can be trained on a more diverse set of thermal image variations, improving its performance in handling modality differences.

What other pre-training strategies could be explored to further improve the network's ability to handle modality differences

To further enhance the network's ability to handle modality differences, additional pre-training strategies can be explored. One potential strategy is to leverage self-supervised learning techniques, such as contrastive learning or generative modeling, to learn meaningful representations from the visible and thermal image data. By pre-training the network on a diverse set of tasks that encourage the model to capture intrinsic features of both modalities, the network can develop a more robust understanding of the differences between visible and thermal images. Another approach could involve incorporating domain-specific knowledge into the pre-training process, such as physical properties of thermal radiation and material emissivity, to guide the network in learning relevant features for cross-modal matching. By combining these strategies with the existing masked image modeling pre-training, the network can gain a more comprehensive understanding of the modality differences and improve its performance in matching tasks.

How can the XoFTR framework be adapted to other cross-modal matching tasks, such as visible-infrared or visible-radar image matching

Adapting the XoFTR framework to other cross-modal matching tasks, such as visible-infrared or visible-radar image matching, involves modifying the network architecture and training process to accommodate the specific characteristics of the new modalities. For visible-infrared image matching, which involves matching images from the visible spectrum with those from the infrared spectrum, the network can be trained using a similar two-stage approach with masked image modeling pre-training and fine-tuning with augmented images. However, the network architecture may need to be adjusted to account for the differences in feature representations between visible and infrared images. Additionally, incorporating domain-specific knowledge about infrared imaging, such as thermal signatures and emissivity properties, can help the network learn relevant features for accurate matching. Similarly, for visible-radar image matching, the network can be adapted to handle the unique characteristics of radar images, such as different reflectivity patterns and noise profiles. Pre-training strategies can focus on learning to extract features that are common across visible and radar images while capturing the distinct properties of each modality. By customizing the network architecture and training process for each specific cross-modal matching task, the XoFTR framework can be effectively applied to a variety of multimodal image matching scenarios.
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