# LightGlue: Local Feature Matching at Light Speed

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.13643 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13643/

## Key facts

- Cited by 590 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 57 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Linformer: Self-Attention with Linear Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04768/) (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)
- [LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08239/) (2022)
- [Self-Attention with Relative Position Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02155/) (2018)
- [Perceiver: General Perception with Iterative Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03206/) (2021)
- [ORB-SLAM: a Versatile and Accurate Monocular SLAM System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.00956/) (2015)
- [LoFTR: Detector-Free Local Feature Matching with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00680/) (2021)
- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [Training Deep Nets with Sublinear Memory Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06174/) (2016)
- [Computational Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00567/) (2018)
- [MegaDepth: Learning Single-View Depth Prediction from Internet Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00607/) (2018)
- [Universal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03819/) (2018)
- [Perceiver IO: A General Architecture for Structured Inputs & Outputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14795/) (2021)
- [BranchyNet: Fast Inference via Early Exiting from Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01686/) (2017)
- [From Coarse to Fine: Robust Hierarchical Localization at Large Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03506/) (2018)
- [Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05830/) (2016)
- [DISK: Learning local features with policy gradient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13566/) (2020)
- [Confident Adaptive Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07061/) (2022)
- [LIFT: Learned Invariant Feature Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09114/) (2016)
- [HPatches: A benchmark and evaluation of handcrafted and learned local descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05939/) (2017)
- [Depth-Adaptive Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10073/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 590)

- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [3D Reconstruction with Spatial Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16061/) (2024)
- [Visual Geometry Grounded Deep Structure From Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04563/) (2023)
- [ViPE: Video Pose Engine for 3D Geometric Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10934/) (2025)
- [MASt3R-SfM: a Fully-Integrated Solution for Unconstrained Structure-from-Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19152/) (2024)
- [Efficient LoFTR: Semi-Dense Local Feature Matching with Sparse-Like Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04765/) (2024)
- [VGGT-Long: Chunk it, Loop it, Align it -- Pushing VGGT's Limits on Kilometer-scale Long RGB Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16443/) (2025)
- [XFeat: Accelerated Features for Lightweight Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19174/) (2024)
- [Point3R: Streaming 3D Reconstruction with Explicit Spatial Pointer Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02863/) (2025)
- [Reloc3r: Large-Scale Training of Relative Camera Pose Regression for Generalizable, Fast, and Accurate Visual Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08376/) (2024)
- [Scene Coordinate Reconstruction: Posing of Image Collections via Incremental Learning of a Relocalizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14351/) (2024)
- [How NeRFs and 3D Gaussian Splatting are Reshaping SLAM: a Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13255/) (2024)
- [Pow3R: Empowering Unconstrained 3D Reconstruction with Camera and Scene Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17316/) (2025)
- [Detector-Free Structure from Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15669/) (2023)
- [Deep Patch Visual SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01654/) (2024)
- [You See it, You Got it: Learning 3D Creation on Pose-Free Videos at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06699/) (2024)
- [DeDoDe: Detect, Don't Describe -- Describe, Don't Detect for Local Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08479/) (2023)
- [PF3plat: Pose-Free Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22128/) (2024)
- [Dense Optical Tracking: Connecting the Dots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00786/) (2023)
- [FlowMap: High-Quality Camera Poses, Intrinsics, and Depth via Gradient Descent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15259/) (2024)
- [Insert Anything: Image Insertion via In-Context Editing in DiT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15009/) (2025)
- [MegaScenes: Scene-Level View Synthesis at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11819/) (2024)
- [UniGoal: Towards Universal Zero-shot Goal-oriented Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10630/) (2025)
- [OmniGlue: Generalizable Feature Matching with Foundation Model Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12979/) (2024)
- [RoMa v2: Harder Better Faster Denser Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15706/) (2025)
- [GaussNav: Gaussian Splatting for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11625/) (2024)
- [XoFTR: Cross-modal Feature Matching Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09692/) (2024)
- [Light3R-SfM: Towards Feed-forward Structure-from-Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14914/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce LightGlue, a deep neural network that learns to match local features across images. We revisit multiple design decisions of SuperGlue, the state of the art in sparse matching, and derive simple but effective improvements. Cumulatively, they make LightGlue more efficient - in terms of both memory and computation, more accurate, and much easier to train. One key property is that LightGlue is adaptive to the difficulty of the problem: the inference is much faster on image pairs that are intuitively easy to match, for example because of a larger visual overlap or limited appearance change. This opens up exciting prospects for deploying deep matchers in latency-sensitive applications like 3D reconstruction. The code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/cvg/LightGlue.