DKNAS: A Practical Deep Keypoint Extraction Framework Based on Neural Architecture Search

Abstract

Keypoint extraction including both keypoint detection and description is a fundamental step in a wide range of geometric multimedia applications. In recent years, many learning-based approaches for keypoint extraction emerge and achieve promising results. However, they usually design network architectures empirically and lack of considerations about the comprehensive performance, which leads to limited applications. In this paper, we propose a practical framework based on Neural Architecture Search (NAS) technology, DKNAS, which can search architectures automatically and maintain efficiency and effectiveness, simultaneously. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed framework is the first NAS framework for keypoint extraction. The evaluation on HPatches dataset shows that our method achieves state-of-the-art results in the metrics of repeatability, localization error, homography accuracy and matching scores. Besides, our model is applied to a traditional Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system, ORB-SLAM2, to replace the handcrafted keypoints. Experimental results demonstrate that the system adopting our model outperforms ORB-SLAM2 and some other deep keypoints enhanced systems.