Image Template Matching via Dense and Consistent Contrastive Learning

Bo Li, Lin Yuanbo Wu, Deyin Liu, Hongyang Chen, Yuanxin Ye, Xianghua Xie

Abstract: Image template matching refers to localizing a small query image as opposed to a large reference image map. The query image a.k.a template has to be screened across every equal-sized region in the reference map to perform inner-product at pixel-level and the resulting similarity indicates the template location. Due to the domain heterogeneity between template and reference images, the matching performance degrades under dramatic appearance changes. More severely, the asymmetric matching easily leads to over-fitting by suggesting excessively false positive regions. To these ends, we propose an effective template matching method based on contrastive learning to perform a dense and consistent InfoNCEloss during matching. This can increase the matching at finer details, and thus effectively regularizes network training to prevent over-fitting. Extensive experiments on the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and optical datasets, i.e., SEN1-2 and OS datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.