Multimodal Image Matching Based on Cross-Modality Completion Pre-training

The differences in imaging devices cause multimodal images to have modal differences and geometric distortions, complicating the matching task. Deep learning-based matching methods struggle with multimodal images due to the lack of large annotated multimodal datasets. To address these challenges, we propose XCP-Match based on cross-modality completion pre-training. XCP-Match has two phases. (1) Self-supervised cross-modality completion pre-training based on real multimodal image dataset. We develop a novel pre-training model to learn cross-modal semantic features. The pre-training uses masked image modeling method for cross-modality completion, and introduces an attention-weighted contrastive loss to emphasize matching in overlapping areas. (2) Supervised fine-tuning for multimodal image matching based on the augmented MegaDepth dataset. XCP-Match constructs a complete matching framework to overcome geometric distortions and achieve precise matching. Two-phase training encourages the model to learn deep cross-modal semantic information, improving adaptation to modal differences without needing large annotated datasets. Experiments demonstrate that XCP-Match outperforms existing algorithms on public datasets.