# FeatureBooster: Boosting Feature Descriptors with a Lightweight Neural Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.15069 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15069/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [SuperGlue: Learning Feature Matching with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11763/) (2019)
- [SuperPoint: Self-Supervised Interest Point Detection and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07629/) (2017)
- [LoFTR: Detector-Free Local Feature Matching with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00680/) (2021)
- [ORB-SLAM2: an Open-Source SLAM System for Monocular, Stereo and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.06475/) (2016)
- [MegaDepth: Learning Single-View Depth Prediction from Internet Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00607/) (2018)
- [From Coarse to Fine: Robust Hierarchical Localization at Large Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03506/) (2018)
- [D2-Net: A Trainable CNN for Joint Detection and Description of Local Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03561/) (2019)
- [DISK: Learning local features with policy gradient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13566/) (2020)
- [HPatches: A benchmark and evaluation of handcrafted and learned local descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05939/) (2017)
- [Working hard to know your neighbor's margins: Local descriptor learning loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.10872/) (2017)
- [R2D2: Repeatable and Reliable Detector and Descriptor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06195/) (2019)
- [Pixel-Perfect Structure-from-Motion with Featuremetric Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08291/) (2021)
- [LF-Net: Learning Local Features from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09662/) (2018)
- [SOSNet: Second Order Similarity Regularization for Local Descriptor Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05019/) (2019)
- [An Attention Free Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14103/) (2021)
- [Learning Feature Descriptors using Camera Pose Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13324/) (2020)
- [ContextDesc: Local Descriptor Augmentation with Cross-Modality Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04084/) (2019)
- [ALIKE: Accurate and Lightweight Keypoint Detection and Descriptor Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02906/) (2021)
- [GeoDesc: Learning Local Descriptors by Integrating Geometry Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06294/) (2018)
- [Local Descriptors Optimized for Average Precision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05312/) (2018)
- [Multi-View Optimization of Local Feature Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08348/) (2020)
- [RoRD: Rotation-Robust Descriptors and Orthographic Views for Local Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08573/) (2021)
- [Cross-Descriptor Visual Localization and Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01377/) (2020)
- [InLoc: Indoor Visual Localization with Dense Matching and View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10368/) (2018)
- [SConE: Siamese Constellation Embedding Descriptor for Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11054/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Local Feature Matching Using Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17592/) (2024)
- [LiftFeat: 3D Geometry-Aware Local Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03422/) (2025)
- [Deep Learning Reforms Image Matching: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04619/) (2025)
- [RaCo: Ranking and Covariance for Practical Learned Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15755/) (2026)
- [FBINeRF: Feature-Based Integrated Recurrent Network for Pinhole and Fisheye Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01878/) (2024)
- [Matching Semantically Similar Non-Identical Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08227/) (2024)
- [GMatch: A Lightweight, Geometry-Constrained Keypoint Matcher for Zero-Shot 6DoF Pose Estimation in Robotic Grasp Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16144/) (2025)
- [From Pairs to Sequences: Track-Aware Policy Gradients for Keypoint Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20630/) (2026)
- [Cross-Modality Feature Fusion Based on Structured State Space Duality for Multimodal Image Registration Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03341/) (2026)
- [Desc++: Efficient Descriptor Enhancement for Data Association in Existing Visual SLAM Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11099/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce a lightweight network to improve descriptors of keypoints within the same image. The network takes the original descriptors and the geometric properties of keypoints as the input, and uses an MLP-based self-boosting stage and a Transformer-based cross-boosting stage to enhance the descriptors. The boosted descriptors can be either real-valued or binary ones. We use the proposed network to boost both hand-crafted (ORB, SIFT) and the state-of-the-art learning-based descriptors (SuperPoint, ALIKE) and evaluate them on image matching, visual localization, and structure-from-motion tasks. The results show that our method significantly improves the performance of each task, particularly in challenging cases such as large illumination changes or repetitive patterns. Our method requires only 3.2ms on desktop GPU and 27ms on embedded GPU to process 2000 features, which is fast enough to be applied to a practical system. The code and trained weights are publicly available at github.com/SJTU-ViSYS/FeatureBooster.