# Scene-Aware Feature Matching

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.09949 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09949/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [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)
- [Unsupervised Deep Embedding for Clustering Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06335/) (2015)
- [MegaDepth: Learning Single-View Depth Prediction from Internet Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00607/) (2018)
- [GroupViT: Semantic Segmentation Emerges from Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11094/) (2022)
- [Direct Sparse Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02565/) (2016)
- [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)
- [HPatches: A benchmark and evaluation of handcrafted and learned local descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05939/) (2017)
- [Towards K-means-friendly Spaces: Simultaneous Deep Learning and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.04794/) (2016)
- [Revisiting Oxford and Paris: Large-Scale Image Retrieval Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11285/) (2018)
- [Learning to Find Good Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05971/) (2017)
- [Neighbourhood Consensus Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.10510/) (2018)
- [LF-Net: Learning Local Features from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09662/) (2018)
- [Learning Discrete Representations via Information Maximizing Self-Augmented Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08720/) (2017)
- [Learning Two-View Correspondences and Geometry Using Order-Aware Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04964/) (2019)
- [Patch2Pix: Epipolar-Guided Pixel-Level Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01909/) (2020)
- [MatchFormer: Interleaving Attention in Transformers for Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09645/) (2022)
- [Learning Feature Descriptors using Camera Pose Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13324/) (2020)
- [Dual-Resolution Correspondence Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08844/) (2020)
- [Guide Local Feature Matching by Overlap Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09050/) (2022)
- [CNN-Based Joint Clustering and Representation Learning with Feature Drift Compensation for Large-Scale Image Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07091/) (2017)
- [ParaFormer: Parallel Attention Transformer for Efficient Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00941/) (2023)
- [Learning to Guide Local Feature Matches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10959/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Deep Learning Reforms Image Matching: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04619/) (2025)
- [SceneGlue: Scene-Aware Transformer for Feature Matching without Scene-Level Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13941/) (2026)
- [Not All Pixels Are Equal: Confidence-Guided Attention for Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02161/) (2025)
- [Cross-View Feature Matching: Survey, Benchmarking, and Foundation-Model Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11093/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current feature matching methods focus on point-level matching, pursuing better representation learning of individual features, but lacking further understanding of the scene. This results in significant performance degradation when handling challenging scenes such as scenes with large viewpoint and illumination changes. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel model named SAM, which applies attentional grouping to guide Scene-Aware feature Matching. SAM handles multi-level features, i.e., image tokens and group tokens, with attention layers, and groups the image tokens with the proposed token grouping module. Our model can be trained by ground-truth matches only and produce reasonable grouping results. With the sense-aware grouping guidance, SAM is not only more accurate and robust but also more interpretable than conventional feature matching models. Sufficient experiments on various applications, including homography estimation, pose estimation, and image matching, demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance.