# TopicFM+: Boosting Accuracy and Efficiency of Topic-Assisted Feature Matching

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.00485 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00485/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 63 of its 86 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 63)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (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)
- [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)
- [ORB-SLAM3: An Accurate Open-Source Library for Visual, Visual-Inertial and Multi-Map SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11898/) (2020)
- [MegaDepth: Learning Single-View Depth Prediction from Internet Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00607/) (2018)
- [LightGlue: Local Feature Matching at Light Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13643/) (2023)
- [From Coarse to Fine: Robust Hierarchical Localization at Large Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03506/) (2018)
- [RepVGG: Making VGG-style ConvNets Great Again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03697/) (2021)
- [BlendedMVS: A Large-scale Dataset for Generalized Multi-view Stereo Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10127/) (2019)
- [Efficient Attention: Attention with Linear Complexities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01243/) (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)
- [LIFT: Learned Invariant Feature Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09114/) (2016)
- [RoMa: Robust Dense Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15404/) (2023)
- [HPatches: A benchmark and evaluation of handcrafted and learned local descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05939/) (2017)
- [Large-Scale Image Retrieval with Attentive Deep Local Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06321/) (2016)
- [Image Matching across Wide Baselines: From Paper to Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01587/) (2020)
- [R2D2: Repeatable and Reliable Detector and Descriptor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06195/) (2019)
- [COTR: Correspondence Transformer for Matching Across Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14167/) (2021)
- [DKM: Dense Kernelized Feature Matching for Geometry Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00667/) (2022)

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

- [XoFTR: Cross-modal Feature Matching Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09692/) (2024)
- [CoMatch: Dynamic Covisibility-Aware Transformer for Bilateral Subpixel-Level Semi-Dense Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23925/) (2025)
- [Deep Learning Reforms Image Matching: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04619/) (2025)
- [Region Matters: Efficient and Reliable Region-Aware Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22390/) (2026)
- [SGAD: Semantic and Geometric-aware Descriptor for Local Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02278/) (2025)
- [Revisiting Change Detection Methods for their Application to Serac Fall Time-Lapse Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28100/) (2026)
- [TreeDGS: Aerial Gaussian Splatting for Distant DBH Measurement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12823/) (2026)
- [SGFormer: Structure-Guided Transformer for Robust Local Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03423/) (2026)
- [Cross-View Feature Matching: Survey, Benchmarking, and Foundation-Model Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11093/) (2026)
- [UltraMatch: Transport Path Routing for Ultra-Fast and Memory-Efficient Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36980/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This study tackles the challenge of image matching in difficult scenarios, such as scenes with significant variations or limited texture, with a strong emphasis on computational efficiency. Previous studies have attempted to address this challenge by encoding global scene contexts using Transformers. However, these approaches suffer from high computational costs and may not capture sufficient high-level contextual information, such as structural shapes or semantic instances. Consequently, the encoded features may lack discriminative power in challenging scenes. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel image-matching method that leverages a topic-modeling strategy to capture high-level contexts in images. Our method represents each image as a multinomial distribution over topics, where each topic represents a latent semantic instance. By incorporating these topics, we can effectively capture comprehensive context information and obtain discriminative and high-quality features. Additionally, our method effectively matches features within corresponding semantic regions by estimating the covisible topics. To enhance the efficiency of feature matching, we have designed a network with a pooling-and-merging attention module. This module reduces computation by employing attention only on fixed-sized topics and small-sized features. Through extensive experiments, we have demonstrated the superiority of our method in challenging scenarios. Specifically, our method significantly reduces computational costs while maintaining higher image-matching accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods. The code will be updated soon at https://github.com/TruongKhang/TopicFM