DGC-Net: Dense Geometric Correspondence Network

TL;DR

DGC-Net is a CNN framework designed for dense pixel correspondence estimation that effectively handles large geometric transformations, outperforming existing methods in accuracy and robustness.

Contribution

It introduces a coarse-to-fine CNN approach trained on synthetic data to improve dense correspondence estimation under large transformations.

Findings

Outperforms existing dense correspondence methods.

Achieves subpixel accuracy in large transformation scenarios.

Effective in relative camera pose estimation.

Abstract

This paper addresses the challenge of dense pixel correspondence estimation between two images. This problem is closely related to optical flow estimation task where ConvNets (CNNs) have recently achieved significant progress. While optical flow methods produce very accurate results for the small pixel translation and limited appearance variation scenarios, they hardly deal with the strong geometric transformations that we consider in this work. In this paper, we propose a coarse-to-fine CNN-based framework that can leverage the advantages of optical flow approaches and extend them to the case of large transformations providing dense and subpixel accurate estimates. It is trained on synthetic transformations and demonstrates very good performance to unseen, realistic, data. Further, we apply our method to the problem of relative camera pose estimation and demonstrate that the model outperforms existing dense approaches.