Grownbb: Gromov–Wasserstein learning of neural best buddies for cross-domain correspondence

Identifying pixel correspondences between two images is a fundamental task in computer vision, and has been widely used for 3D reconstruction, image morphing, and image retrieval. The neural best buddies (NBB) finds sparse correspondences between cross-domain images, which have semantically related local structures, though could be quite different in semantics as well as appearances. This paper presents a new method for cross-domain image correspondence, called GroWNBB, by incorporating the Gromov–Wasserstein learning into the NBB framework. Specifically, we utilize the NBB as the backbone to search feature matching from deep layer and propagate to low layer. While for each layer, we modify the strategy of NBB by further mapping the matching pairs obtained from the NBB within and across images into graphs, then formulate the matches as optimal transport between graphs, and use Gromov–Wasserstein learning to establish matches between these graphs. Consequently, our approach considers the relationships between images as well as the relationships within images, which makes the correspondence more stable. Our experiments demonstrate that GroWNBB achieves state-of-the-art performance on cross-domain correspondence and outperforms other popular methods in intra-class and same object correspondence estimation. Our code is available at https://github.com/NolanInLowland/GroWNBB .