ORA-NET: Enhancing Image Feature Matching through Oriented Overlapping Region Alignment

Image feature matching is a fundamental task in computer vision. Existing local feature matching methods can establish robust correspondences between image pairs. However, these methods heavily rely on dense local image features, making them susceptible to significant perspective differences, characterized by rotation and scale changes. To alleviate this limitation, we introduce a novel oriented Overlapping Region Alignment method, named ORA-NET, which presents a concise and efficient approach to enhance the performance of image feature matching methods. We introduce the Multidirectional Cross-scale Feature Aggregation module to aggregate rotation-equivariant features across multiple scales and model long-range dependencies. Additionally, the Oriented Overlap Alignment module estimates scale and rotation differences within overlapping regions using a coarse-to-fine rotation correction approach. Importantly, our method serves as a plug-and-play module that can be seamlessly integrated into other correspondence matching pipelines. Experimental results demonstrate that ORA-NET significantly enhances the matching performance of existing local feature matching methods, particularly in scenarios involving substantial perspective differences.