# Good Keypoints for the Two-View Geometry Estimation Problem

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18767 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18767/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [SuperPoint: Self-Supervised Interest Point Detection and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07629/) (2017)
- [Deep Image Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10925/) (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)
- [MegaDepth: Learning Single-View Depth Prediction from Internet Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00607/) (2018)
- [DISK: Learning local features with policy gradient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13566/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Image Matching across Wide Baselines: From Paper to Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01587/) (2020)
- [Working hard to know your neighbor's margins: Local descriptor learning loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.10872/) (2017)
- [DKM: Dense Kernelized Feature Matching for Geometry Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00667/) (2022)
- [Learning to Find Good Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05971/) (2017)
- [LF-Net: Learning Local Features from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09662/) (2018)
- [Patch2Pix: Epipolar-Guided Pixel-Level Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01909/) (2020)
- [Key.Net: Keypoint Detection by Handcrafted and Learned CNN Filters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00889/) (2019)
- [Learning Accurate Dense Correspondences and When to Trust Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01710/) (2021)
- [TILDE: A Temporally Invariant Learned DEtector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4568/) (2014)
- [TopicFM: Robust and Interpretable Topic-Assisted Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00328/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Equivariant Learning for Oriented Keypoint Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08613/) (2022)
- [A Large Scale Homography Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09997/) (2023)
- [NeSS-ST: Detecting Good and Stable Keypoints with a Neural Stability Score and the Shi-Tomasi Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01069/) (2023)
- [GMM-IKRS: Gaussian Mixture Models for Interpretable Keypoint Refinement and Scoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17149/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Local features are essential to many modern downstream applications. Therefore, it is of interest to determine the properties of local features that contribute to the downstream performance for a better design of feature detectors and descriptors. In our work, we propose a new theoretical model for scoring feature points (keypoints) in the context of the two-view geometry estimation problem. The model determines two properties that a good keypoint for solving the homography estimation problem should have: be repeatable and have a small expected measurement error. This result provides key insights into why maximizing the number of correspondences doesn't always lead to better homography estimation accuracy. We use the developed model to design a method that detects keypoints that benefit the homography estimation and introduce the Bounded NeSS-ST (BoNeSS-ST) keypoint detector. The novelty of BoNeSS-ST comes from strong theoretical foundations, a more accurate keypoint scoring due to subpixel refinement and a cost designed for superior robustness to low saliency keypoints. As a result, BoNeSS-ST outperforms prior self-supervised local feature detectors on the planar homography estimation task and is on par with them on the epipolar geometry estimation task.