# AMatFormer: Efficient Feature Matching via Anchor Matching Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.19205 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19205/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Neural Message Passing for Quantum Chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01212/) (2017)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04560/) (2021)
- [LoFTR: Detector-Free Local Feature Matching with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00680/) (2021)
- [CvT: Introducing Convolutions to Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15808/) (2021)
- [CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14899/) (2021)
- [Going deeper with Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17239/) (2021)
- [CSWin Transformer: A General Vision Transformer Backbone with Cross-Shaped Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00652/) (2021)
- [Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15436/) (2021)
- [COTR: Correspondence Transformer for Matching Across Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14167/) (2021)
- [Large-scale Multi-Modal Pre-trained Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10035/) (2023)
- [Learning Two-View Correspondences and Geometry Using Order-Aware Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04964/) (2019)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Scene Graphs: Generation and Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01111/) (2021)
- [Learning Combinatorial Embedding Networks for Deep Graph Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00597/) (2019)
- [Learning to Match Features with Seeded Graph Matching Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08771/) (2021)
- [Deep Graph Matching Consensus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09621/) (2020)
- [Deep Graph Matching via Blackbox Differentiation of Combinatorial Solvers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11657/) (2020)
- [ContextDesc: Local Descriptor Augmentation with Cross-Modality Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04084/) (2019)
- [HARDVS: Revisiting Human Activity Recognition with Dynamic Vision Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09648/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [VcT: Visual change Transformer for Remote Sensing Image Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11417/) (2023)
- [EViT: An Eagle Vision Transformer with Bi-Fovea Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06629/) (2023)
- [Cross-View Feature Matching: Survey, Benchmarking, and Foundation-Model Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11093/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Learning based feature matching methods have been commonly studied in recent years. The core issue for learning feature matching is to how to learn (1) discriminative representations for feature points (or regions) within each intra-image and (2) consensus representations for feature points across inter-images. Recently, self- and cross-attention models have been exploited to address this issue. However, in many scenes, features are coming with large-scale, redundant and outliers contaminated. Previous self-/cross-attention models generally conduct message passing on all primal features which thus lead to redundant learning and high computational cost. To mitigate limitations, inspired by recent seed matching methods, in this paper, we propose a novel efficient Anchor Matching Transformer (AMatFormer) for the feature matching problem. AMatFormer has two main aspects: First, it mainly conducts self-/cross-attention on some anchor features and leverages these anchor features as message bottleneck to learn the representations for all primal features. Thus, it can be implemented efficiently and compactly. Second, AMatFormer adopts a shared FFN module to further embed the features of two images into the common domain and thus learn the consensus feature representations for the matching problem. Experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed AMatFormer matching approach.