DHM-Net: Deep Hypergraph Modeling for Robust Feature Matching

We present a novel deep hypergraph modeling architecture (called DHM-Net) for feature matching in this paper. Our network focuses on learning reliable correspondences between two sets of initial feature points by establishing a dynamic hypergraph structure that models group-wise relationships and assigns weights to each node. Compared to existing feature matching methods that only consider pair-wise relationships via a simple graph, our dynamic hypergraph is capable of modeling nonlinear higher-order group-wise relationships among correspondences in an interaction capturing and attention representation learning fashion. Specifically, we propose a novel Deep Hypergraph Modeling block, which initializes an overall hypergraph by utilizing neighbor information, and then adopts node-to-hyperedge and hyperedge-to-node strategies to propagate interaction information among correspondences while assigning weights based on hypergraph attention. In addition, we propose a Differentiation Correspondence-Aware Attention mechanism to optimize the hypergraph for promoting representation learning. The proposed mechanism is able to effectively locate the exact position of the object of importance via the correspondence aware encoding and simple feature gating mechanism to distinguish candidates of inliers. In short, we learn such a dynamic hypergraph format that embeds deep group-wise interactions to explicitly infer categories of correspondences. To demonstrate the effectiveness of DHM-Net, we perform extensive experiments on both real-world outdoor and indoor datasets. Particularly, experimental results show that DHM-Net surpasses the state-of-the-art method by a sizable margin. Our approach obtains an 11.65% improvement under error threshold of 5° for relative pose estimation task on YFCC100M dataset. Code will be released at https://github.com/CSX777/DHM-Net. © 2024 IEEE.