CorrNeXt: Making the ConvNet-Style Correspondence Pruner Stronger for Two-View Geometry

The uproar over two-view correspondence pruning stems from the advent of the ConvNet-style paradigm, which showcases intrinsic proficiency in local context aggregation, tackling the context-agnostic deficiency of MLP-based methods fundamentally and delivering impressive pruning capability. To further unlock the potential of such a paradigm, this perspective study revisits its design decisions and introduces CorrNeXt, a cutting-edge ConvNet-style pruner that incorporates multiple simple but effective improvements. Firstly, we explicitly integrate 2D relative spatial knowledge into motion field modeling, arming the interconversion between unordered sparse motion vectors and ordered image-structured ones with positional awareness. Secondly, considering that existing methods struggle with perceiving global context due to limited receptive field of small-kernel convolution, we devise a context-orthogonal aggregation module that decomposes computationally expensive large-kernel depthwise convolution along channel dimension into a small square kernel, two orthogonal band kernels, and an identity mapping, enjoying large receptive field while maintaining efficiency. Thirdly, we deploy a motion field pyramid architecture that obtains and fuses multi-level motion fields, thereby facilitating the handling of the motion field's discontinuities in case of large scene disparity. Ultimately, we propose an elastic inference strategy that allows the model to introspect the confidence of its predictions at each layer, through which CorrNeXt is endowed with the flexibility of adaptively determining inference termination according to the difficulty of each image pair. Thorough experimentation affirms CorrNeXt's remarkable capabilities.