AFD-Net: Aggregated Feature Difference Learning for Cross-Spectral Image Patch Matching

Abstract

Image patch matching across different spectral domains is more challenging than in a single spectral domain. We consider the reason is twofold: 1. the weaker discriminative feature learned by conventional methods; 2. the significant appearance difference between two images domains. To tackle these problems, we propose an aggregated feature difference learning network (AFD-Net). Unlike other methods that merely rely on the high-level features, we find the feature differences in other levels also provide useful learning information. Thus, the multi-level feature differences are aggregated to enhance the discrimination. To make features invariant across different domains, we introduce a domain invariant feature extraction network based on instance normalization (IN). In order to optimize the AFD-Net, we borrow the large margin cosine loss which can minimize intra-class distance and maximize inter-class distance between matching and non-matching samples. Extensive experiments show that AFD-Net largely outperforms the state-of-the-arts on the cross-spectral dataset, meanwhile, demonstrates a considerable generalizability on a single spectral dataset.