EPM-Net: a better way for optical and infrared scene matching via edge point

As a crucial auxiliary technique in inertial navigation, scene matching has been widely applied in aircraft navigation and guidance. To enhance the adaptability and efficiency of scene matching algorithms in complex environments, existing approaches have gradually shifted towards heterogeneous scene matching, such as optical/ infrared scene matching based on deep learning features, with a focus on point features. However, due to the complex and diverse nonlinear distortions between optical and infrared images, the matching accuracy often fails to meet the practical requirements of navigation and positioning. In view of this problem, an EPM-Net algorithm based on edge features is proposed to improve matching performance by extracting more stable and discriminative edge point descriptors. Experimental results on infrared datasets demonstrate that this method achieves an average matching accuracy improvement of more than four times compared to traditional and existing deep learning methods.