# Learning Accurate Template Matching with Differentiable Coarse-to-Fine Correspondence Refinement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.08438 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08438/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 82 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [Reformer: The Efficient Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04451/) (2020)
- [SuperGlue: Learning Feature Matching with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11763/) (2019)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [SuperPoint: Self-Supervised Interest Point Detection and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07629/) (2017)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [LoFTR: Detector-Free Local Feature Matching with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00680/) (2021)
- [Efficient Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06732/) (2020)
- [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)
- [LIFT: Learned Invariant Feature Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09114/) (2016)
- [DSAC - Differentiable RANSAC for Camera Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05705/) (2016)
- [Kornia: an Open Source Differentiable Computer Vision Library for PyTorch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02190/) (2019)
- [Rethinking and Improving Relative Position Encoding for Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14222/) (2021)
- [Geometric Transformer for Fast and Robust Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06688/) (2022)
- [COTR: Correspondence Transformer for Matching Across Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14167/) (2021)
- [Neighbourhood Consensus Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.10510/) (2018)
- [Pixel Difference Networks for Efficient Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07009/) (2021)
- [PointDSC: Robust Point Cloud Registration using Deep Spatial Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05465/) (2021)
- [GLU-Net: Global-Local Universal Network for Dense Flow and Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05524/) (2019)
- [Convolutional neural network architecture for geometric matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05593/) (2017)
- [Deep Image Homography Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03798/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Harnessing Massive Satellite Imagery with Efficient Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11933/) (2024)
- [Curve-Aware Gaussian Splatting for 3D Parametric Curve Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21401/) (2025)
- [Self-supervised Learning of Hybrid Part-aware 3D Representations of 2D Gaussians and Superquadrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10789/) (2024)
- [Tensorial template matching for fast cross-correlation with rotations and its application for tomography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02398/) (2024)
- [Template Matching in Images using Segmented Normalized Cross-Correlation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01286/) (2025)
- [Auto-regressive transformation for image alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04864/) (2025)
- [Generalized Deep Multi-view Clustering via Causal Learning with Partially Aligned Cross-view Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16022/) (2025)
- [Intra-view and Inter-view Correlation Guided Multi-view Novel Class Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12029/) (2025)
- [An Efficient Deep Template Matching and In-Plane Pose Estimation Method via Template-Aware Dynamic Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01678/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Template matching is a fundamental task in computer vision and has been studied for decades. It plays an essential role in manufacturing industry for estimating the poses of different parts, facilitating downstream tasks such as robotic grasping. Existing methods fail when the template and source images have different modalities, cluttered backgrounds or weak textures. They also rarely consider geometric transformations via homographies, which commonly exist even for planar industrial parts. To tackle the challenges, we propose an accurate template matching method based on differentiable coarse-to-fine correspondence refinement. We use an edge-aware module to overcome the domain gap between the mask template and the grayscale image, allowing robust matching. An initial warp is estimated using coarse correspondences based on novel structure-aware information provided by transformers. This initial alignment is passed to a refinement network using references and aligned images to obtain sub-pixel level correspondences which are used to give the final geometric transformation. Extensive evaluation shows that our method is significantly better than state-of-the-art methods and baselines, providing good generalization ability and visually plausible results even on unseen real data.