OCA: ODE-Driven Cross-Attention for Image-to-Point-Cloud Registration

Cross-attention is a crucial component in learning-based image-to-point-cloud (I2P) registration. Although existing cross-attention mechanisms have achieved promising progress, attention ambiguity remains a fundamental challenge that hinders the learning of discriminative 2D-3D correspondences. To address this problem, we revisit cross-attention and establish ordinary differential equations (ODEs) to model the ideal I2P feature interaction. Based on this formulation, we develop an ODE-driven cross-attention (OCA) module that refines feature representations and attention matrices through ODEs. In practice, OCA can be seamlessly integrated into existing I2P registration frameworks. To validate its effectiveness, we incorporate OCA into five state-of-the-art baselines and evaluate on four public benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that OCA improves registration recall by up to 5%, 9%, and 15% under the standard, fine-tuning, and zero-shot settings, respectively.