This repository contains the PyTorch implementation of our work Digging Into Self-Supervised Learning of Feature Descriptors presented at 3DV 2021 [Project page] [ArXiv]

TL;DR: The paper proposes an Unsupervised CNN-based local descriptor that is robust to illumination changes and competitve with its fully-(weakly-)supervised counterparts.

Local image descriptors learning pipeline

conda create -n hndesc_env python=3.9
conda activate hndesc_env
pip install -r requirements.txt

The pretrained models are available here. In this project, we use the Hydra library to handle JSON-based config files.

Please download the preprocessed original MegaDepth dataset, its stylized copy, and precomputed SuperPoint keypoints and unzip to $HNDESC_TRAIN_DATA. The data (~24 Gb) is available on GDrive. Once the data is downloaded, please do the following:

• Modify the HNDesc/configs/main.yaml config file by changing the key data_params.dataset_dir to $HNDESC_TRAIN_DATA
• Start training by running python train.py

One can specify the backbone network [caps, r2d2] as well as the batch size, learning rate, and the number of training iterations by changing specific keys of the config file.

We provide code for evaluation HNDesc on the following benchmarks/tasks: image matching (HPatches), image retrieval (rOxford5k, rParis6k, and Tokyo24/7), and camera relocalization (Aachen v1.1). The code is available under experiments/. Download the model weights and extract them to assets/.

Once the model weights obtained, there are two ways of evaluation on HPatches:

One can run the eval_on_hpatches.sh script that automatically downloads the HPatches dataset and performs evaluation. Before evaluation, it is required to specify $DATASETS_PATH where the dataset is going to be downloaded.

Or manually change the config files:

• Open experiments/configs/main.yaml and change the following keys:
  • defaults.task to hpatches
  • defaults.descriptor to hndesc
  • paths.datasets_home_dir to $DATASETS_PATH
• Run python main.py under experiments/

Once finished, the extracted features as well as a txt file with the results are saved at HNDesc/output_hndesc/extracted_kpts_descs/hpatches/superpoint_orig-n-1-rNone__hndesc_caps_hndesc_caps_MP_st/. For the model specified in eval_on_hpatches.sh the output txt file is the following:

PCK benchmark:
MMA@1 v/i/avg: 0.250 / 0.426 / 0.338
MMA@2 v/i/avg: 0.505 / 0.602 / 0.554
MMA@3 v/i/avg: 0.630 / 0.716 / 0.673
MMA@4 v/i/avg: 0.695 / 0.778 / 0.737
MMA@5 v/i/avg: 0.732 / 0.822 / 0.777
MMA@6 v/i/avg: 0.757 / 0.845 / 0.801
MMA@7 v/i/avg: 0.774 / 0.862 / 0.818
MMA@8 v/i/avg: 0.787 / 0.879 / 0.833
MMA@9 v/i/avg: 0.797 / 0.894 / 0.846
MMA@10 v/i/avg: 0.806 / 0.906 / 0.856
Homography benchmark:
th: 1 v/i/avg: 0.207 / 0.492 / 0.344
th: 3 v/i/avg: 0.557 / 0.858 / 0.702
th: 5 v/i/avg: 0.700 / 0.973 / 0.831
th: 10 v/i/avg: 0.846 / 0.996 / 0.919

Download the rOxford5k, rParis6k datasets, and the list of precomputed nearest neighbors using the following GDrive link (~4.5Gb). Copy the downloaded archive to $EVAL_DATASETS_PATH and extract it there. Modify the experiments/configs/main.yaml config file in the following way:

• defaults.task to image_retrieval_radenovic
• paths.datasets_home_dir to $EVAL_DATASETS_PATH
• Run python main.py under experiments/

• Install COLMAP to $COLMAP_DIR
• Modify the paths.colmap_dir key in experiments/configs/task/localization_aachen_v11.yaml to $COLMAP_DIR
• Download the preprocessed data using the following GDrive link (~6.5Gb) and copy to $EVAL_DATASETS_PATH
• Modify the paths.datasets_home_dir key in experiments/configs/main.yaml to $EVAL_DATASETS_PATH
• Modify the defaults.task key in experiments/configs/main.yaml to localization_aachen_v11
• Run python main.py under experiments/ The resulted file with predicted query poses is placed at output_hndesc/extracted_kpts_descs/visual_localization/pred.txt and one can upload it to https://www.visuallocalization.net/ to get localization performance.

If you find our work useful, please cite both papers:

  @inproceedings{Melekhov2021hndesc,
    title = {Digging Into Self-Supervised Learning of Feature Descriptors},
    author = {Melekhov, Iaroslav and Laskar, Zakaria and Li, Xiaotian and Wang, Shuzhe and Kannala Juho},
    booktitle = {In Proceedings of the International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV)},
    year = {2021}}

  @article{Melekhov2020Nian,
    author = {{Melekhov, Iaroslav and Brostow, Gabriel J. and Kannala, Juho and Turmukhambetov, Daniyar},
    title = {Image Stylization for Robust Features},
    journal = {Arxiv preprint arXiv:2008.06959},
    year = {2020}}