Semantic Correspondence with Geometric Structure Analysis

This article studies the correspondence problem for semantically similar images, which is challenging due to the joint visual and geometric deformations. We introduce the Flip-aware Distance Ratio method (FDR) to solve this problem from the perspective of geometric structure analysis. First, a distance ratio constraint is introduced to enforce the geometric consistencies between images with large visual variations, whereas local geometric jitters are tolerated via a smoothness term. For challenging cases with symmetric structures, our proposed method exploits Curl to suppress the mismatches. Subsequently, image correspondence is formulated as a permutation problem, for which we propose a Gradient Guided Simulated Annealing (GGSA) algorithm to perform a robust discrete optimization. Experiments on simulated and real-world datasets, where both visual and geometric deformations are present, indicate that our method significantly improves the baselines for both visually and semantically similar images.