Dense Keypoints via Multiview Supervision
Datasets and Benchmarks Track
Authors: Zhixuan Yu, Haozheng Yu, Long Sha, Sujoy Ganguly, Hyun Soo Park

This paper presents a new end-to-end semi-supervised framework to learn a dense keypoint detector using unlabeled multiview images. A key challenge lies in ﬁnding the exact correspondences between the dense keypoints in multiple views since the inverse of the keypoint mapping can be neither analytically derived nor differentiated. This limits applying existing multiview supervision approaches used to learn sparse keypoints that rely on the exact correspondences. To address this challenge, we derive a new probabilistic epipolar constraint that encodes the two desired properties. (1) Soft correspondence: we deﬁne a matchability, which measures a likelihood of a point matching to the other image’s corresponding point, thus relaxing the requirement of the exact correspondences. (2) Geometric consistency: every point in the continuous correspondence ﬁelds must satisfy the multiview consistency collectively. We formulate a probabilistic epipolar constraint using a weighted average of epipolar errors through the matchability thereby generalizing the point-to-point geometric error to the ﬁeld-to-ﬁeld geometric error. This generalization facilitates learning a geometrically coherent dense keypoint detection model by utilizing a large number of unlabeled multiview images. Additionally, to prevent degenerative cases, we employ a distillation-based regularization by using a pretrained model. Finally, we design a new neural network architecture, made of twin networks, that effectively minimizes the probabilistic epipolar errors of all possible correspondences between two view images by building afﬁnity matrices. Our method shows superior performance compared to existing methods, including non-differentiable bootstrapping in terms of keypoint accuracy, multiview consistency, and 3D reconstruction accuracy.